


Everything is Burning

by tenacity_plys



Series: Everything is Burning [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: AO3 Tags - Freeform, Ambiguous Relationships, Angst, Art, Asexuality Spectrum, Awkwardness, Break Up, Chatting & Messaging, College, Comfort, Complicated Relationships, Crushes, Crying, Dating, Disability, Dorkiness, Drama, Education, F/F, Falling In Love, Feelings, Feels, Female Character of Color, Female Characters, Female Relationships, Fights, Flashbacks, Flirting, Friendship, Future Fic, Gender Related, Getting Together, Higher Education, Historical, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Idiots in Love, Introspection, Jealousy, LGBTQ Character of Color, LGBTQ Themes, Lesbians in Space, Loss, Love, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Misunderstandings, Multi, Nonbinary Character, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Other, Outer Space, Pining, Plot, Possessive Behavior, Queer Character, Queer Themes, Queerplatonic Relationships, Romance, Royalty, School, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Secrets, Slice of Life, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Slow Romance, Space Opera, Space Stations, Tragedy, Trans, Trans Character, Trauma, Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:34:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 77,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27457294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenacity_plys/pseuds/tenacity_plys
Summary: A long-distance college romance set in a hypercapitalist space empire, told as a future historian's PhD thesis. Oh, and it's gay.When Arch's girlfriend asks them to move 20 lightyears away to be with her, they have to choose between their girlfriend and their best friend.Meanwhile, Ana has just gotten into grad school on Pluto, fulfilling her obsessive dream of doing research in the ruins of humanity's first home--but Earth isn't what she expected.Meanwhile meanwhile, Gem's best friend might be leaving to go live with their weirdo girlfriend on Pluto, and she'd low-key have no reason to live if they left.And finally meanwhile, the heir to a Feudal Space Capitalist Empire™ has just been thrust into this three-person time bomb of interpersonal drama, which is awkward because she's never made a real friend before.
Series: Everything is Burning [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2006095
Comments: 16
Kudos: 10





	1. Chatlog 09-09-3434-2045

Chatlog 09-09-3434-2045

Ana: Arch! Are you there?  
Arch: Yeah. I mean, am I ever not?   
Ana: You are often absent!   
Ana: You were asleep for fourteen hours yesterday.  
Ana: I know, because you forgot to log off.  
Arch: Are you saying you watched me sleep that whole time?   
Ana: Not the whole time. I had work to do.  
Ana: I mostly just kept the feed in the background of my screen.  
Ana: Like using a picture of your pet as wallpaper.  
Arch: I...don't know how to respond to that.  
Arch: Hey, wait, are you already doing work?  
Arch: It's the first week of classes!   
Arch: You're such a nerd.  
Ana: As if you are not a nerd!  
Ana: And after all, RCC has been in session for weeks.  
Ana: Not all worlds operate on your Alexandrian schedule!  
Ana: Typical brainwashed imperial ;)  
Arch: I'll pretend I didn't hear that.  
Arch: So, are you working on your thesis now?  
Ana: As well as I can.  
Ana: My thesis advisor is as yet unassigned.  
Ana: Typical RCC incompetence!  
Ana: To mitigate my rage, I'm working on an article.  
Ana: I plan to submit it to Inner Ring Anthropology Quarterly.  
Arch: Oooh, you're going to be published?! That's awesome!  
Ana: Well, that remains to be seen.  
Ana: Inner Ring Anthropology Quarterly is more exclusive than the RCC student journal.   
Ana: And much more exclusive than my blog…  
Arch: Well, good luck! <3  
Ana: Thanks. <3  
Ana: The paper is about Beyonce.  
Ana: Many argue that there was a long line of priestesses who all took that name for religious reasons,  
Ana: And some even argue that she was one artist with many distinct creative phases,  
Ana: but I support the more recent theory that "Beyonce" was simply a very common name.   
Arch: Huh. Cool!   
Arch: That’s great that you’re getting your writing out there!  
Ana: I will be glad to finally get the recognition I deserve.  
Ana: After all, I am here to produce groundbreaking scholarship, and chew bubble gum.  
Ana: And I am all out of bubble gum.  
Arch: Classic Ana.   
Ana: That's Late Modern Classical Ana to you ;).  
Ana: And academics publish under their military rank,   
Ana: so instead it's, unfortunately, Cadet Kepler.  
Arch: Aw. You'll pass that fitness test soon.  
Arch: And you know it's just a technicality!   
Ana: That makes it more irksome.  
Arch: Well, it's still good that your field is like, interesting to you,  
Arch: And like a coherent thing you've decided to study, and stuff...  
Arch: Must be nice :/  
Ana: Ah. You are dispirited by your aimlessness?  
Arch: Tactful as always, Ana.  
Ana: Well, perhaps your, ahem, lovely friend from class last year can help ;)  
Ana: Join her little club!  
Ana: It sounded like she really wanted to sell you on a career in politics!  
Ana: Get it? Because your politicians are for-profit,  
Ana: and your planet is a feudal-capitalist oligarchy—  
Arch: Yeah, yeah, Kepler. You don’t live in a dystopia, we get it.   
Ana: Well. I still need a life support suit to go outside; I am hardly living the dream.  
Arch: True. At least I have “knowing what fresh air smells like” under my belt.   
Arch: That’s one thing I’ve got going for me…  
Arch: Okay, so I know that was a joke just now,  
Arch: But Group Project Girl has made...a reappearance.  
Ana: Oh really?   
Arch: She got assigned as my roommate this year.  
Ana: Really.  
Ana: Hmm. Unusual.  
Ana: Don't you get to choose your roommates?  
Ana: Aren't you still allowed some false choices to mask your utter submission to the state?  
Arch: I wouldn't say it masks the utter submission, but yes, most people choose.  
Arch: I just didn't know anyone I would want to choose, or who would choose me.  
Arch: But that's the weird thing.   
Arch: She's a Political Business major, so she would have wanted to live with someone she could network with.  
Arch: I would think?!  
Ana: Maybe she thinks you could be a profitable business connection.  
Ana: Your parents are prominent in the monopoly that rules your province, yes?  
Arch: Ssh, around here it’s the business that manages my province.   
Arch: And they’re not a monopoly, they’re just very good at business.   
Ana: Ah, of course.   
Ana: I shall avoid any talk that could get me investigated by your planet’s secret police.  
Arch: Sssssh, around here, they're not the secret police, they’re nothing because they don't exist.  
Ana: How could I have forgotten.   
Ana: I must say, I’m glad to be here in the Inner Ring, out of your planet’s military reach…  
Arch: Our “peacekeeping influence.”  
Ana: Right, yes.  
Arch: But yeah, you’re right.  
Arch: It's just that...I mostly sleep in my room or talk to you.  
Arch: Wouldn't think I'd be a desirable connection.  
Ana: Maybe she desires you in other ways.  
Arch: What?!?!  
Arch: Hahaha, Kepler, I didn't know you made jokes!  
Ana: ;)  
Ana: The probability of this room assignment must have been very low.  
Arch: Yeah.   
Arch: Probably around the odds of life randomly evolving on a big wet rock orbiting Sol—really low, but apparently not zero.   
Ana: Mm. What I mean is--could she have pulled strings to get placed with you?   
Ana: You mentioned she was impressed with your performance on the group project.  
Arch: I think you might have been studying the American Imperialism period a little too long.  
Arch: Alexandrian politics isn't Machiavellian cunning and deft diplomacy.  
Arch: It's kind of a shitshow.  
Arch: Mostly there's just a bunch of cliques of rich people,  
Arch: And they yell at each other every Senate session until they do...nothing,  
Arch: Then they get re-elected because they buy their elections,  
Arch: And soon we'll all die.  
Ana: Hm. Well.  
Ana: Speaking of my work though, I have some news.   
Arch: What is it?  
Ana: Your part-time therapist duties during my master’s applications have paid off.  
Ana: I got accepted to the Pluto grad program. I’m going to Sol System!   
Arch: Holy shit! Ana, that’s insane!   
Arch: That’s…20 light years away.   
Ana: Only 12 from me.   
Ana: Well.  
Ana: 12.5.  
Ana: I start mid-year because of that.  
Arch: Oh.   
Ana: Their library is unparallelled.   
Ana: I’ll have access to so much information!  
Ana: And they have one of the most prestigious archaeology journals in the galaxy;   
Ana: It’s the Inner Ring Anthropology Quarterly of archaeology journals.   
Arch: Um, that’s great…  
Ana: I know what you’re thinking: why would an anthropologist write for an archaeology journal?  
Ana: Well, they have a lot of overlap:  
Arch: Ana, wait.  
Ana: After all, anthroplogists do archaeology—  
Ana: Oh! I forgot to mention!   
Ana: I’ll get to go on research expeditions, on Earth itself!   
Ana: And I’m already so used to life-support suits; I bet my findings will be better than everyone else’s as a result!  
Arch: Wait!   
Arch: …what about us?  
Ana: Hm?  
Arch: What about both of us moving to Tau Ceti after graduation?  
Arch: The algae farm, and the chickens, and the freaky real eggs from the chickens?  
Ana: Oh.   
Ana: Well…maybe Sol can be the new Tau Ceti!  
Arch: What do you mean?!  
Ana: Well, there are very few anthropology opportunities on a distant military outpost with no relevant history.  
Ana: And no opportunities for you to…er…find yourself, or something.   
Ana: So, what if we changed the plan?  
Arch: That’s a lot to ask.   
Ana: …  
Ana: Is that a refusal?  
[Arch is typing]  
[Arch is typing]  
Arch: It’s just a lot.   
[Arch is typing]  
[Arch is typing]  
[Arch is typing]  
Ana: Stop typing things out and deleting them.   
Ana: Just talk to me.   
Ana: What is more important to you in this universe than us?  
[Arch is typing]  
Arch: You’re asking me to uproot my whole life.   
Arch: That’s…a lot!   
Arch: I can’t just say yes, I need to think.  
Ana: What is keeping you from saying yes?!   
Ana: You once told me you didn’t even have that much to keep you…  
Ana: you know.   
Ana: In the universe.   
Ana: So what is there to keep you on Alexandria specifically?   
Arch: My entire life!  
[Arch is typing]  
[Arch is typing]  
Arch: And that was an awful thing to say.  
Ana: I’m sorry.  
[Ana is typing]  
[Ana is typing]  
Ana: You just tell me you hate Alexandria, and AU, every time we talk.   
Ana: And you tell me you love me, every time we talk.   
Ana: That makes me think this decision should be easy for you.   
Ana: If you meant it.  
Arch: ……..  
Arch: That’s also an awful thing to say.  
Ana: Well.   
Ana: Did you mean it?  
Arch: Of course. I don’t think you understand what you’re asking.   
Arch: Instead of going 5 ly each way to a place that doesn’t have anything for either of us there, Arch: you want me to come 20 ly for a place that will only be convenient for you?  
Arch: I mean, what if I asked you to come here to live with me?  
Ana: I’d say: since I have so many plans based on where I want to go, what is stopping you from coming with me instead?  
Arch: So you wouldn’t do for me, what you’re asking me to do for you.  
Ana: Again—is this a refusal?  
Arch: It’s not anything. You just asked me this two seconds ago. I don’t have a decision yet.  
Ana: Well.   
Ana: I’m leaving in a year.   
Ana: So I guess you have a while to make your decision.  
Arch: Okay.   
Arch: …  
Arch: Cool.   
Arch: Thanks.  
Arch: …I’m glad you get it.  
Arch: For a second there, I thought you were, like,   
Arch: I don’t know,  
Ana: Talk to me when you’ve decided.  
[Ana has disconnected]  
Arch…oh.  



	2. Arch

The first day Arch didn’t talk to Ana, they didn’t know it was the first day.[1] From the moment Arch awoke they were filled with anxiety and hopelessness, but this was normal first thing in the morning, so they didn’t think much of it. Arch called this feeling “morning dread.” In keeping with their typical morning routine, they tucked their head under the covers and tried to pretend other people didn’t exist, and that they themselves didn’t exist, and that the whole universe and all the dread being created by all the living beings existing inside it, didn’t exist. Nothingness. Nothingness. Nothingness. Peace.

Unfortunately, this was a Tuesday,[2] so their roommate’s blaring alarm went off on the wall across the room just a few minutes later. If they had glanced out of their covers, they would have seen the notification hovering above their roommate’s [3] as she efficiently stretched in preparation for her day. Arch had disabled the default alarm system that woke them up in time for their classes every day, but their roommate had not done the same. So, on days when their roommate also had an early class, Arch had no choice but to be on time.

They knew the morning dread tended to dissipate a few minutes after they got up, but that never made it any easier. Arch reflected on the irony: they were able to modify their screen to suit their needs, they could hack the instance of the school’s AI that was running locally in their room as their butler/PC, and they could get about any other device they encountered to do what they wanted as well, but their brain’s proprietary software remained mostly uncrackable. Makes you think, they mentally muttered to themselves. 

After a minor battle with the aforementioned software, they threw off the covers and forced themselves upright. "I'm in," they wearily yawned.

~ ~ ~

It was always unpredictable how close Centaurian station[4] would be orbiting relative to Arch’s dorm, so there ended up being 20 extra minutes of flight time. Arch wasn’t worried; most of their class was on the shuttle with them, so they wouldn’t have to be the only one late. Instead of interacting with anyone in their class, they got a planetside window and watched Alexandria go by, the nighttime half of its surface bristling with nodes of light, its outer crust of satellites and residence stations slowly revolving around it in waves and ripples.[5]

After class Arch bummed around Centaurian for the day, with Gem intermittently joining them, until the two of them eventually took the shuttle service back from their last classes. Gem, who had noticed Arch staggering slightly as they disembarked, took this opportunity to drag Arch to their first meal of the day. After their dinner—or whatever meal it technically was—Arch returned to the room with much steadier legs, only to have Elizabeth ask them to get dinner. They were grateful they had already eaten. It was only then that Arch assumed their customary position hunched over their screen in bed, and realized they hadn’t heard from Ana all day. 

Cooling off from the fight, they guessed. They tried to imagine what they would do with their life if they really did go to Pluto. Instead of going back down to the planet after college, they would live in artificial environments their whole life, without a real biome in reach for decades. They tried to imagine being with Ana in person; watching her make scarily intense expressions while writing a paper, pace around while she went on a rant, rub her temples as she stared into space thinking hard about something… These were all things they had watched her do over their interstellar video link with its tinny audiovisual interference, but now it would all be in person, right in front of them where they could reach out and touch her. She would have that type of presence that only comes from the mass and density of another human being exuding warmth and light amounts of radioactivity right next to you, rather than lightyears away. 

Then they tried to imagine being apart from Gem. Having to schedule times to talk online after coordinating their classes with hers from high school all the way through college. Only hearing Gem’s brash Outer Ring accent through an interstellar connection, and only seeing her frenetic fidgeting on a screen instead of being driven crazy by it happening right next to them. No cooking with Gem, no borrowing Gem’s weird pretentious paper books, no stealing Gem’s sugary food at meals. Gem wouldn’t be able to break into their room to forcibly hang out with them when their depression got really bad, and Arch wouldn’t be able to go over to Gem’s place to do chores for her when her knuckles were bleeding from overwashing her hands.

Ana had been right about Arch not having any life plans on Alexandria, though. It didn’t ultimately matter if they made plans, since their parents could and would get them a job at their province’s megacorp right out of college--in a respectable department, like sales, the military, or legal. As always, resistance to these plans would ultimately be futile. On Pluto, Arch might not know what to do with their life, but at least they wouldn’t have to follow a plan that had been laid out for them when they were in utero.[6] But what could they do with their life on a second-class planet populated only with soldiers and scientists?

“How are your classes going?” Elizabeth, sitting primly straight in front of her tablet across the room, had a way of breaking into Arch’s thoughts at the moment they needed to escape making a decision the most. It almost made up for how she always spoke to them in a loud, enunciatory voice that made Arch think she might think they were deaf, or a child.

Arch poked their head out of their blanket cave. “I don’t really care.” 

“I see. I wish I had your…laidback attitude.” Elizabeth visibly forced herself to keep trying. It was like an older relative trying to humor a kid telling them about some annoying make-believe game, not wanting to squash the child’s confidence (and potentially their development of crucial spatial and social reasoning skills) by not playing along.

There was a pause from Elizabeth's side of the room. “Is something funny?” The question had a brittle civility, implying Arch had done something inappropriate that she was going to politely ignore. At this moment there was a basis to ths tone, since Arch was just staring at her instead of continuing their conversation.

“No.” Arch made a show of retreating back into their blankets. They were pretty sure Elizabeth was unoffended, and secretly relieved, by their social rejection, since it meant she could stop trying and go back to whatever she was doing. They guessed even Elizabeth couldn't be "on" in recruit-Arch-to-club mode all the time.

As the decisive patter of Elizabeth’s typing resumed across the room, Arch read over their conversation with Ana from the previous night. Talk to me when you’ve decided. Arch was certain she couldn’t have meant it. After all, Ana would have known how isolated Arch would be without her, but she also would have known that Arch knew that she would be even more isolated. Ana was one of two people Arch was close with, but for Ana, Arch was one of one. They had to give Ana credit for being so suicidally stubborn as to take the power in a situation where she had absolutely no strategic advantage. 

Or maybe Ana just knew that in a standoff Arch would be more than likely to give up their advantage just to be done with the conflict. She was probably at her computer right now, calmly doing her schoolwork, or maybe her self-assigned work that she actually wrote up syllabuses for, waiting for Arch to message her. She would be counting on Arch's squishy, illogical feelings (which she never had, oh no, not Ana Kepler, proud owner of the only objective perspective in the universe) to give her victory by default. 

It wasn’t just that she was right. It was how smug that implied she was about it. Arch signed off of their messenger program. Time to sleep for fourteen hours. 

~

After the first week Arch didn’t talk to Ana, they finally began to give credence to the pot of apprehension that had been bubbling in their stomach since The Conversation. They lay awake hours every night replaying their last messages with Ana in their head, or sometimes taking out their screen and rereading it over and over. Their morning dread had escalated until they were waking up every day feeling hungover. One morning they actually tried to puke after waking up, but it didn’t work. Elizabeth called a med drone on them though, but since it made them skip class for the day the whole thing actually worked out fine. They did end up spending literally the whole day staring at the same spot on their ceiling, though.

They came to realize their usual routine was really pathetic and sad without constant conversation and commentary from Ana. They became aware of every second passing as they sat looking into their screen, or listening to Elizabeth practice her presentations for whatever Poli-Biz[7] bullshit she was working on, or tuning out the “discussion” in their classes as their classmates just repeated whatever they had heard in the latest EM’s propaganda.[8] Every day they looked forward to going to bed, when they wouldn’t have to be thinking about how long it had been since they talked to Ana. But they were becoming increasingly unable to sleep. 

By the second week Arch didn’t talk to Ana, they had finished the book they were reading, and had finished or grown tired of the shows they had been watching as well. For a couple days they lingered on the last pages, put off watching the finales, because they didn’t want to think about what it meant that it had been that long since their fight. They saw Ana come online and go offline at her usual times of day, and she was seeing them do the same. It was like making eye contact with someone across a room but not acknowledging them at all. 

Finally, they decided to rewatch all of Toxic, because it made them feel connected to her again to watch their favorite show, and also because it was so long there was no way they could finish all 15 extant seasons of it without Ana’s silence being broken. They wouldn’t have to think about the significance of both starting and finishing a piece of EM without talking to Ana once. 

They made all these decisions without making them, in a place in the back of their mind, where their thoughts didn’t form into words. When they hung out with Gem they avoided the subject, and even lied in response to direct questions about Ana. They scrolled all Ana’s sparse social media accounts without thinking the words, “I am stalking my girlfriend, who may not be my girlfriend anymore.” They knew the steps of this coping mechanism by heart, could have told themselves it was what they would do in this situation. But the thing about coping mechanisms, just like with dreams, is if you think too hard about them you can’t immerse yourself in them in peace. You feel obligated to wake up.

The third week Arch didn’t talk to Ana, they mainly just played Toxic in one window on their screen, while rereading their conversations with Ana in another. They read all the way back to high school, hearing her voice perfectly in their head—Ana typed exactly how she talked. They became increasingly frustrated at not being able to replay their video chats with her; they wanted to watch the night in her library when they had seen her for the first time. 

They remembered the shaky camera as she carried her screen through the shelves. Drives, disc cases, media players, and once a shelf of paper books that Ana said had all been brought from Old Earth itself, their pages made from the pulp of plants that drew their nourishment from Sol and put down roots in the planet where humanity grew up. In hindsight, Arch supposed she had taken that route through the library on purpose, nonchalantly holding her screen just so to ensure Arch would catch a glimpse and ask about them.

When they had gone through all the chat conversations, Arch began reading Ana’s blog posts; there were no recent ones, because Ana had been submitting her essays to “respectable journals” the past year or so in an attempt to legitimize herself with an academia that didn’t conduct itself solely through fan websites. Arch read back to Ana’s childhood; they imagined the young Ana who had taken it upon herself to write a scholarly critique of the interactive VR sexual education series provided by her boarding school; at this point they were imagining an Ana of some sort at every moment of the day.

The fourth week Arch didn’t talk to Ana, they broke down and called her in between classes; they called her on audio only; they didn’t want to start crying over video. It seemed like they could barely remember what it was like to call Ana every day; they usually had a message from her waiting every time they checked a device; being on the internet at all had felt like being with her, even if they weren’t actually talking. Arch called her but of course she didn’t pick up; Arch hadn’t expected her to. They left a message asking if she was okay anyway; they just wanted to talk; they loved her; they hadn’t ever wanted to hurt her; they hung up and cried in the empty classroom for a while; back in their room Elizabeth was practicing a speech for her public relations class; Arch was lying on their bed staring at the ceiling; they couldn’t even think out counterpoints to Elizabeth’s propaganda; they couldn’t really think at all; when they tried the thoughts just slipped away half finished; eventually Elizabeth asked to turn off the light; they said “go for it” but didn’t look at her; then the room was black but Arch was still staring at the ceiling. 

The fifth week Arch didn’t talk to Ana, they missed the intra-station train to their next class; they would be late for sure but it was too far on foot; the next train was due in five minutes; something blew a fuse in their head; it was just one thing too far; the stubbing of a toe on top of a lost limb; the last straw that broke the camel's back; they didn’t wait for the train; they took the stairs; they knew they could make it if they ran; so they did; they threw themselves into it; they couldn’t remember the last time they exercised; they couldn’t remember the last time something had felt this important; they had only gone up a few flights before they started to feel lightheaded; soon they were more falling forwards than climbing; they wouldn’t stop though; they knew they could do it; they had to do it; they just needed to climb faster; they could hear themselves crying but didn’t feel it somehow; they couldn’t see where they were running; they were sobbing too hard to run; they were on their knees; their hands were shaking; they didn’t know how long they stayed there; they could barely make it back to their room; after that they stopped going to class.

Footnotes

1 I know what you’re thinking: how are these two on the same day/night schedules if Arch is in the Middle Ring, and Ana is 10 ly Solward, in the Inner Ring? Well: since the earliest space stations that orbited Earth, people living in space have gone by Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). That means, if you’re on a space station, or anywhere else without a natural planetary day/night cycle, your time is synced up with everyone else in space, everywhere. That's true whether you're in the Inner Ring, 10 ly away from Earth, or the Middle Ring, 20 ly away, or even the Outer Ring, 35 ly away and beyond. On Earth it was kind of silly because UTC was the same thing as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), with a different name. Now, Greenwich is a burned out husk on a dead planet, but UTC has remained.[return to text]

2 What do you mean, “why is there still Tuesday in the year 3434?” Humanity has had more important things to think about for the past thousand years than coming up with some kind of Space Calendar for its colonies to use. A species that has just been violently uprooted from its home needs something familiar to cling to as it flings itself into the unknown. Sometimes, that something is Tuesday.[return to text]

3 And before you ask, no, the walls in this room are not all one screen, with notifications that pop up right next to you wherever you are. That would be one of the worst possible ways to build a room. Have you ever cracked your phone? Can you imagine having your entire home be made of that material? You would destroy the whole place in days.[return to text]

Literally just think about that idea for five seconds. Maybe you’d suggest having the glass be thicker, but the thing is, genius, you wouldn’t be able to use the walls as a touchscreen if the glass was thicker because the whole point of touchscreens is that the heat from your hands needs to be able to get through the glass and into the sensors in the phone. 

Maybe you would say the screens could be made of diamond, which you probably mean sapphire because you’re probably thinking of how the iPhone 6 was going to have a sapphire screen for a while. Well, then the sapphire would then have to encase the entire room, meaning that literally each individual room in every apartment everywhere would have to be covered in sapphire. And synthetically made sapphire also wouldn’t work, because while sapphire can withstand huge amounts of heat, it is actually more fragile than glass and would break your apartment even more. That's why the iPhone 6 didn’t actually have a sapphire screen. 

And you might say, what about super-strong future glass that can both be thin and not break (not even bothering to think about how that would work; you just lazily toss out the random idea of super-strong future glass), but even if that was a thing, which it’s not, then you still have to deal with the problem of actually erecting four giant screens per room and running electricity through those screen-walls. Feel like paying for ten TV’s worth of electricity bills just so you can get texts on your walls? 

I'm just saying, it's a stupid idea. Here, there are conveniently placed, public wall screens, usually tablet-size, all over the school, including on the walls next to each student’s bed. These serve as alarm clocks and as a medium for school-wide announcements, among other things.

4At Alexandria University, like most colleges, classes and housing are located in separate places.[return to text]

5Due to the disaster known as The Bug, Alexandria has unprecedented levels of orbital housing to accomodate the populations that would have inhabited the other two planned colonies of the Middle Ring. Some people consider the “Bug Belt” of residence stations an eyesore, but some see beauty in it, like an LA sunset on Old Earth.[return to text]

6The in utero part isn’t a joke; Arch was selected out of many potential zygotes due to a range of genetic factors. One major trauma of Arch’s childhood was being presented as evidence in court during their parents’ malpractice lawsuit against the company that did their genetic engineering.[return to text]

7Political Business, the major for anyone who intends to be anyone.[return to text]

8Entertainment Media. Both a thing people consume, and the other major for anyone who intends to be anyone.[return to text]


	3. Chatlog 04-25-3430-2145

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ~ flashback buds ~

Chatlog 04-25-3430-2145

Ana: Hello. I am messaging you regarding a disrespectful comment you made on a recent post of mine. Please remove it. Thank you.  
Arch: …why would i comment on anything?  
Ana: I cannot pretend to know your motives.  
Ana: Just delete the comment.  
Ana: If you need a memory refresher:  
Ana: [link]  
Arch: Oh, that.  
Arch: Huh.  
Arch: You know, I’ve seen you around a lot on the boards.  
Arch: You’ve got a lot of opinions on teen dramas, don’t you?  
Ana: I have never seen you before at all. Are you a lurker?  
Ana: Maybe you are unfamiliar with the rules of an internet community,  
Ana: but it’s usually customary to leave comments that involve factual claims, and civil discourse.  
Arch: …Wow, you’re just like your posts.  
Ana: Thank you.  
Arch: Um…anyway, what do you mean “remove” the comment?  
Ana: Um, take it down?  
Arch: Down?  
Ana: Take it off the board!  
Ana: Make it so that it is no longer there!  
Ana: Are you a child or something?  
Arch: Um, I’m 14. So, maybe?  
Arch: But like, you can’t…do that?  
Arch: Like, how am I supposed to remove something from the internet?  
Ana: You delete it!  
Arch: You keep using those words, but—  
Arch: Like, are you able to post something, and then make it disappear?  
Arch: Like it never existed?  
Ana: …Are you not?  
Ana: Wait, where are you from?  
Arch: I’m from Alexandria. Where do you live?  
Ana: India.  
Arch: The planet, I assume?  
Ana: For now.  
Arch: Huh. The only planet without a corporate sponsor. What’s that like?  
Ana: Is Alexandrian education in such disrepair that you’re unaware?  
Arch: I got the Cliffsnotes™ Standardized Civics Textbook version.  
Arch: Cultural hub of the Inner Ring, really hot, etc.  
Ana: What a thrillingly sensitive portrayal of my culture.  
Arch: I tried.  
Arch: But wait—I didn’t know people on India could delete internet posts.  
Arch: Can you make people forget things you say after you say them, too?  
Ana: Unfortunately, no.  
Ana: Alexandrian transparency laws must be worse than I thought.  
Ana: Are you required to disrobe in front of people upon meeting them, too?  
Arch: No. Though it’s nice to see some humor from you, creepy as it is.  
Ana: ……..  
Ana: In any case.  
Ana: If you can’t remove the comment, you should at least post a public apology in the thread disowning it.  
Arch: So, you want me to make a public apology about something I said about a soap opera for teens?  
Ana: Yes. It is the only polite thing to do.  
Arch: You literally have to be a troll. Like, this is an impossible situation.  
Ana: As I thought, you’re just not used to internet community rules.  
Ana: If you have an opinion, even if it is on a “soap opera for teens” like Toxic, you either defend it, or you concede.  
Ana: That’s the respectful way to engage in debate online.  
Arch: You should really go out and get some fresh air.  
Ana: Considering no one’s been able to go outside on India without a life-support suit in a hundred years, the idea of fresh air is kind of a sore subject over here.  
Arch: Oh, true. That’s kind of what you get for destroying your planet with centuries of industry, though.  
Ana: When you use your planet up, you’ll be coughing blood if you spend too much time outside too.  
Arch: Actually, scientists over here seem to think we won’t use our planet up in the same way.  
Arch: Since we have so many people living in space,  
Arch: which includes them growing most of their food and making most of the things they use in space,  
Arch: it’s taking strain off the planet’s resources.  
Ana: Do any scientists that aren’t paid by your planet’s politicians agree with that analysis?  
Ana: Consider this unfailingly logical and completely ex tempore rebuttal!  
Ana: You had to house the whole Middle Ring population that survived the Bug,  
Ana: so I mean yes, you would have been done in a generation without people living in space.  
Ana: But just because you don't have three planets’ worth of people using up your resources,  
Ana: doesn’t mean you don’t still have one planet’s worth, which is all you need.  
Ana: That’s what happened to literally every other planet, going right back to Earth.  
Ana: Does Alexandrian Exceptionalism really make people that delusional?  
Arch: You’re reeeeally making me not want to take back my comment.  
Arch: How was I even wrong about Toxic, anyway?  
Arch: I have half a mind to defend it now, just to piss you off. Look who’s trolling now!  
Ana: My original post was assessing how historically inaccurate Toxic’s latest storyline is—I trust you actually read my post?  
Arch: Yes. You thought having Britney and Justin continue dating in secret after they broke up publicly wasn’t realistic.  
Arch: And before you say it, I know it didn’t really happen, but why couldn’t it have happened?  
Ana: At that time, celebrities didn't hire armed militia or employ counterintelligence agencies to combat paparazzi.  
Ana: They had to evade them on their own, with at most a personal bodyguard or two to defend them.  
Ana: Anyone would have been able to catch them in the act by following them or waiting outside their houses,  
Ana: without risking so much as a fine for spying on them!  
Ana: Read an ebook.  
Arch: But Amy and Ben dated in secret on Parks and Rec,  
Arch: and if Parks and Rec was made during that period, it’s probably period accurate.  
Arch: It’s like, a primary source.  
Arch: So a secret relationship between public figures like that would have been possible!  
Arch: Hah!  
Ana: You’re utterly wrong.  
Ana: I’m literally publishing a paper about Parks and Rec on my blog very soon.  
Ana: What you fail to understand about Parks and Rec is:  
Ana: Amy and Ben were not watched at the same level as Britney and Justin.  
Ana: They were local officials, not national icons!  
Ana: The comparison is ridiculous, and your expectation that I take it as a valid argument even more so.  
Ana: And are you unaware that Parks and Recreation was a comedy?  
Ana: The situations were meant to be seen as satirically absurd.  
Arch: What are you talking about? I’ve never heard Parks and Rec described as a comedy.  
Arch: If it’s a comedy, why do theater companies keep performing the episodes with those annoying modern interpretations that are supposed to “speak to our time?”  
Arch: …Heh, what do I care, I’m gonna block you in like two seconds.  
Arch: You’re lucky I let you suck me in this far.  
Ana: Wait!  
Ana: If you’re going to be so outrageously pedantic as to block me for making one good point, at least post your apology to show you have conceded.  
Arch: I haven’t conceded anything.  
Arch: You made a random claim, and I decided not to bother indulging your random claim.  
Ana: I am stating facts! The whole reason I am here on the internet is to state facts, and chew bubble gum.  
Ana: And I am all out of bubble gum.  
Arch: …What?  
Arch: And, you haven’t even given any evidence!  
Arch: From what I’ve seen of your posts, isn’t copious evidence your kink or something?  
Arch: And I’m not blocking you because I’m “pedantic,” I’m blocking you because you clearly haven’t seen a sun in a long time.  
Ana: First, we’re also touchy about sun here in the Inner Ring.  
Ana: The sun on India is so hot that we periodically have to reinforce the outside of buildings, because the outer layers literally melt away over time.  
Arch: Right, sorry.  
Ana: Second, I have access to a library of rare and antique resources,  
Ana: where I am able to view original Blu-Ray releases of every season of Parks and Rec.  
Ana: Blu-Rays,  
Ana: in case of the obvious fact that you’ve never taken a history class,  
Ana: were an ancient form of preserving information, primarily EM.  
Ana: On these Blu-Rays, I have access to exclusive, never before seen special features, such as commentary from the stars themselves.  
Ana: These invaluable primary sources not only provide insight into daily life as an actor living in the Late American Empire,  
Ana: but also give confirmation of the authorial intent of the original Parks and Rec cast.  
Ana: Do you know what they do on those commentaries?  
Ana: They laugh!  
Ana: The show is funny to them,  
Ana: because it mocks the everyday experiences of those entrapped in the bureaucracy American government is known for.  
Ana: Remember, this was before the Mergers, so governments almost never turned a profit.  
Arch: Whoa  
Ana: All of American Imperialism depended on taxes, levied from the gross incomes of citizens,  
Arch: Whoa. Stop.  
Ana: I am not finished.  
Arch: I can tell. But I’m actually curious about this “rare Blu-Rays room.”  
Arch: Have you forgotten that Blu-Rays required a Blu-Ray player?  
Arch: I may not have done whatever fucking crazy volume of research you have on history, but I do know Blu-Ray players are kind of rare.  
Arch: Did you actually think I would just believe that you have access to not only a room filled with ancient texts,  
Arch: but also to one of the ancient tools used to play them,  
Arch: which were supposed to be so fragile they would break if you so much as threw them at a wall?!  
Ana: ……..  
Arch: Nothing to say to that? Maybe I won’t even have to block you.  
Ana: My situation is unique.  
Arch: Unique how?  
Ana: My parents own the rare books room…they are quite rich.  
Arch: So now you’re saying you have books?! Get the fuck out.  
Ana: We do have a few books, in fact.  
Ana: But “rare books room” is an academic term to mean any archive of ancient texts.  
Ana: I could go in and play an episode right now.  
Ana: It’s in the visitor’s section of my house, so I can use it without getting any special permissions like I would if I didn’t…live here.  
Arch: Oh really.  
Arch: So you can just go in there whenever you want?  
Arch: Wouldn’t that be kind of dangerous for the Blu-Rays?  
Arch: I’m sure your parents care a lot more about keeping their precious artifacts safe than indulging their weird son’s abnormally intense interests.  
Ana: I’ve been trained extensively.  
Ana: And I’m a girl.  
Ana: My name is Ana.  
Arch: Oh.  
Arch: Sorry.  
Arch: I’m Arch. I use they/them.  
Ana: Hello, Arch.  
Ana: If you want, we can open a video link and I can show you the Blu-Rays.  
Arch: If just talking to you over text is this excruciating, why would I want to expand this to another medium?  
Ana: …To hear about Chris Pratt pranking Amy Poehler on set?


	4. Ana

The moon’s surface was chalk white, pockmarked by craters filled with shadow from the void above. It was a vision of eternity—the vacuum was the oblivion of death; the moon was the white of scoured bone. 

It was beautiful. Sometimes, Ana even liked to pretend it was Earth’s moon. But that was nonsense—there were no pristine crater-plains left there. Earth’s moon, which had stayed virginal for 200,000 years of humanity’s existence, was now crusted with ancient settlement structures like barnacles on a boat’s hull. Ana had been reading about boats the other day, and they sounded fascinating.

Historians weren’t sure, but on Earth barnacle growth might have been encouraged to simulate the symbiotic relationship between certain species of carnivorous fish, and a smaller fish species who clung to them and ate the parasites on their stomachs.[1] Unfortunately, not much was known about barnacles and ships, or the animals they were modelled on. Sharks were already extinct when they started collecting cryosamples for the exodus, and Ana didn’t know if anyone stopped to check on the remora fish while the rest of humanity fled the burning cradle of civilization.

But sometimes, when Ana decided to indulge in the kind of historical revisionism that she particularly hate-enjoyed on shoddy period shows like “Toxic,” she would sit where she could see the view outside, play episodes of classical television on her screen, and imagine she had just arrived there from the only settled planet in the universe. “I hope me and Mary’s DNA samples are free of defects,” she would whisper to herself, pretending to be an immigrant waiting to be processed, “I’m sure Pa’s hydroponics credentials will get us assigned to a nice colony, if we’re cleared for reproduction.”

Of course, the main immigrant processing stations had been on Mars, where Zhong Guo and the American Empire were building their exodus ships, not the moon. Russia, on the other hand, was still mostly fields and potatoes, and had plenty of space on Earth—though building on-planet proved a mistake. Not only did they still have to pay for life-support suits for their workers by the end, but they also didn’t have the advantage of building in zero-g. Not to mention the fuel cost from decelerating the shuttles to pick up colonists on Mars, thought Ana, “Why did Emperor Yuri the Genocide kill himself? He got the gas bill!”

Off-color jokes aside, though, Ana loved her moon. After growing up on a planet so devastated by human industry that its temperatures made Earth’s India[2] look like Earth’s Scandinavia,[3] a place where she was cold all the time, due to the encroaching void of space being just a few fragile meters of steel away, was just fine by her. And it wasn’t even an adjustment to have to wear a life-support suit when she went outside!

She had made footprints in the powdery rock on all the areas of the moon where students could hike. At first it had terrified her to be driven so far from the ground with every step, but she had loved that too before long. Sometimes she would jump backwards with all her strength and just let herself float, so she could pretend she was adrift in the void—before she bumped painfully back down (she had made a fair amount of full-body prints around the moon as well). She also used the rocket thrusters on her suit to get herself as far as she dared from the ground without risking breaking free of the moon’s gravity, hanging there weightless and daring the blackness of space to drag her into oblivion.

Sometimes, though, she would just lie down in the bone-white dirt and watch the stars scattering toward the edges of the universe as it infinitely expanded, running from the Big Bang through space and time like human civilization had been running from the smoking ruins of Old Earth for nearly 1500 years. It reminded her of how tiny she was in this universe, just as the sight of (roughly) those same stars from Earth had reminded ancient humans of their own mortality under the Roman Empire, the Russian Tsars, Zhong Guo’s dynasties of Huang Di, and the relatively short-lived reign of American Imperialism. Memento Mori. I am Ozymandias, King of Kings. Valar Morghulis.

The view held no charms for Ana at this moment, though, nor had it for some weeks—lately she had been altogether too reminded of how tiny and alone she was in this universe. The Pluto grad program had been the fulfillment of her greatest ambitions (or at least as far as school could take her toward them), but the falling out with Arch had thrown a gloom over her, in what should have been her moment of triumph.

Pluto was everything she wanted. She would be roughing it on an original exodus-period settlement, within spitting distance of Old Earth, able to access a library of files—as well as vacuum preserved paper documents![4]—that she could use to write a definitive work on the end of humanity’s 200,000 year stint on Earth. This was the best thing that had ever happened to her…since that night five years ago on India, when she had decided to sneak into her parents’ library with her screen to show a stranger an episode of Parks and Recreation.

Ana consciously stopped and redirected her thoughts toward the topic of her thesis proposal, but it was difficult—she had literally learned cognitive behavioral therapy from Arch’s descriptions of the treatments they were using for their depression. How was she supposed to solve a problem, when the person she went to with her problems was the problem?

Luckily, one didn’t have to deal with one’s problems if one was too busy working to actually feel their emotional consequences. Since she and Arch had stopped speaking, she had been sending herself into such a state of focus on her work that the book she started reading after her evening class often made her late for her first class the next morning. She had never needed much sleep. She did need a lot of coffee, though.

She had been working on yet another critical essay about Toxic—but that reminded her too much of Arch. Fortunately, it wasn’t exactly unique to be fixated on the early 21st century. It encompassed both the fall and comeback of the American Empire and the beginnings of space colonization, so both artists and academics had created more than enough material about it for her to go through in a lifetime. She had watched Titanic, which was thought to be an allegory for global warming[5] by the visionary storyteller James Cameron.[6] Fascination with the ship’s workings had led her to her current reading binge about ocean-travel—it was mind-boggling to imagine a planet where water was so abundant it could actually become a problem.

Leave it to me to procastinate work with more work. Next to the library drive that held everything she had taken out on ocean-travel a few days ago was another drive with all the material on the IT Renaissance she needed to go through in the next week as she wrote the prospectus for her graduate thesis, which she would be expected to come into the program ready to begin researching. It struck her as comical that she would be writing her thesis proposal for grad school before her undergrad thesis advisor had even been assigned to her. Once again, RCC’s adminstration had outdone themselves in incompetence.

She had a year remaining to her at Reinhard Chopra College, India’s top school for media research and development, and while it was almost halfway through the first quarter she still didn’t have anyone to talk to about her thesis idea: how the portrayal of sentient robots in media (like Futurama, Westworld, and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) had laid ground in American culture for the 2547 coup on Proxima b that installed the augmented consciousness of Walt Disney as President of the United States.[7] By contrast, she had already had her first meeting about her graduate thesis—unfortunately, it was the day after she and Arch had stopped talking, so she wasn’t sure if it had gone particularly well.

The advisor’s face had swum into view through static and glitchy artifacts, a marker of the vast distance his likeness was travelling to reach her. Ana’s eyes darted around what she could see of the room in the background—it didn’t look that much different in design from the moon base her master’s program was housed on, but with a trained eye she noted that most of it had probably been assembled on Earth, with only the largest pieces of the base being assembled in space. That construction style put the Pluto base quite early in the 3rd millennium, certainly before near-lightspeed travel.

“Ana Kepler?”

“Yes, Major.” Ana answered, spotting the military patches on the breast of his uniform.

“Oh dear me, no need to address me by rank!” The man was rather old for active service, in Ana’s private opinion—his hair was quite well grayed, and while after years in space an active physical routine was clearly second nature to him, she could see paunching and shrivelling even through the poor video quality. She also saw his personal grooming wasn’t in keeping with any military standards she knew. “Here on Pluto we are an academic base first, and a military one second, I assure you. After all, no one comes here because they like the military.” He chuckled at the thought that anyone with real military ambition might request a transfer to the most remote outpost in the galaxy.

“Glad to hear it, sir. A crew cut would not be a good look on me.” Ana was trying to keep her voice light and her manner ingratiating, but she had never found it easy to make small talk. Since she had reached the mirror stage, she had known that her angular face, intense gaze, and Byronic resting expression was more likely to disconcert than to charm. Having been given all the money and books she needed growing up, charm had thankfully never been necessary for what she wanted to do. This was just as well, since conversation with other people for its own sake was almost never worth it in her view.

She found other people’s intellectual flaccidity irritating and contemptible. The way other people tended to stray from or drop conversational topics on a whim made most socialization seem to her a pointless exercise in underthinking a series of mundane subjects in turn, and then making equally underthought speculations on the future unfoldings of those subjects. Ana preferred one single conversational topic, to be followed through until the topic was exhausted, with the topic preferably—but she was learning to be more flexible on this point—being the early 21st century United States. After all, she was here to do scholarship on the fall of American Imperialism, and chew bubble gum. And she was all out of bubble gum.[8]

The academic advisor’s good-natured chuckling snapped her back to the present. “Oh my no; even uniforms are only required during class hours here, and for outgoing video calls such as this one, of course. Though I must admit, below the regulation jacket I’m wearing for this meeting, I’m sporting some rather non-regulation floral capri pants.”

Ana wasn’t sure what to say to that. “Sorry, but, what should I call you during our advisement sessions, if not Major, sir?”

“Ah yes, I had gotten off track; I tend to do that these days.” Lovely, thought Ana. Still, he seemed like a nice enough old man. Whether he had the intellect to properly critique her upcoming thesis was disturbingly yet to be seen, however. I mean, if he’s no help I guess I can just get notes from Arch instead—Stop. She derailed the thought. No telling what she could get from Arch anymore.

“Well my dear, you can call me Gerhardt, though I will not be your advisor during your time on Pluto—by the time you arrive at the school, I’ll be in stasis on my way to a planet as warm as your own, to spend my retirement.”

“Oh! I see!” Ana had forgotten the distance. Of course he wouldn’t still be teaching when she got there. He was clearly over a hundred, and Ana would have believed as old as 120.

“Yes, this is an odd arrangement, but after all, heads of anthropology are mortal just like the rest of us!”

“Of course.” Ana’s smile strained. The rest of the interview was informative, and naturally exciting, but Arch’s abandonment was a dead coldness in her chest that she could no longer hold back. Resentful thought-loops careened freely across the back of her mind as she struggled to keep the advisor’s words in the foreground, but then her ears pricked up when he said:

“…and of course what with the rapidly shifting sea levels on Earth it’s hard to tell what was where, and when! A few hundred years ago, we thought we had found the wreck of the Titanic, but it turned out to be a life-size model of the Titanic made by Zhong Guo for tourists! Can you imagine?”

“No, sir, I can’t. And I look forward to not having to imagine!” Ana’s eagerness had found a second wind. “One of the things about the Pluto program I’m looking forward to most will be the expeditions to Earth. How exactly does that work, may I ask? Does equipment training take very long? I imagine the life-support suits used for on-planet missions will be of higher grade than is needed in space, since they would naturally need to be workable for all kinds of Earth terrain as well as resistant to radiation, toxins, and archaic bacteria—“ she stopped at the look on her advisor’s face. He seemed like he was trying to decide whether or not she was joking.

After a moment of nonplussed silence, finally he just chuckled: “Ana dear, no one here actually goes to Earth!”

Footnotes

1This is completely untrue.[return to text]

2On Old Earth, the country of India (not to be confused with the planet of the current Inner Ring as of this writing in the year 3434 of the Common Era) was situated on a subcontinent quite close to the equator. Due to this location, it was typically very hot and humid there. An equator, of course, is a ring of territory going around a planet that gets the most exposure to its star due to how the planet is tilted in orbit. [return to text]

3In contrast to India (see note 10 supra) Scandinavia was a region of Old Earth relatively less exposed to the sun, resulting in very cold temperatures.[return to text]

4Considering their age, no one is allowed to actually feel the documents themselves—large heavy vacuum tablets keep the documents pristine while students peer in at them through glass windows. Students are allowed to take the documents back to their rooms to study; there is no limit as to how many can be taken, but due to the weight few students ever take more than one or two. [return to text]

5Titanic here represents human industry, with the iceberg representing inevitable environmental disaster. Titanic’s speed is celebrated, even though it makes the ship more vulnerable to icebergs. The ship’s speed symbolizes many things: the speed petroleum allowed cars, the instant gratification of materialist desires allowed by fast food and mass-production, as well as the speed of communication allowed by high-speed internet and the smartphone. The wealthy passengers aboard Titanic (global corporations) strong-arm the working-class captain (the workers) into pushing the ship beyond what is safe, and not only the wealthy but the passengers of all classes face the consequences. The ship that picks up the passengers represents the ships used for space colonization, and the eventual arrival in America, or “The New World” as it was called, is seen by scholars to be a prophetic foresight of humanity’s eventual environmental disaster and escape from Earth. [return to text]

6Most of Cameron’s 12 part “Avatar” saga is no longer extant, but volumes 7 and 10 are among the most prized items in Reinhard Chopra College’s rare books room. Like William Shakespeare, Cameron appropriated the plotlines of the classics of his day, like Dances With Wolves (1990) and the Smurfs (1981-1990), changing them to fit the stories he wanted to tell. Avatar is the strongest example of this, as well as Cameron’s most influential work. [return to text]

7Ana’s analysis gives altogether too much credit for the coup’s popular support to the public’s perception of robots, when she should be thinking about their perception of Walt Disney himself. Disney controlled his image so well that he was remembered as a beloved children’s film genius for centuries after it was freely available knowledge that he was actually a plagiarizing, bigoted egomaniac. After installing himself as President for life, Disney used the popularity that got him into office to load all of the People’s Democratic United States of America onto spaceships and set a course for the system of Zeta Leporis, 75 lightyears away from the rest of humanity. Since colonization of the stars has not yet reached Zeta Leporis, we have no concrete intelligence on what life is and has been like there. The only media to make it out of the system are the garbled transmissions sporadically sent by Disney’s government (which mainly threaten the rest of human civilization with destruction at America’s hands), as well as the occasional cry for help by some citizen who has found a way to bypass Disney’s chokehold on interstellar communications in the Zeta Leporis colony. Despite Disney’s optimistic predictions of future conquest, the messages that have been received from citizens beg for rescue, speaking of starvation conditions and forced labor at the hands of overseers in costume. [return to text]

8The bubble gum reference Ana is so fond of comes originally from a 1988 science fiction film called “They Live,” but Ana is much more familiar with it in the context of the many parodies and pastiches she’s seen in media through studying her era of expertise, the early 2000s. [return to text]


	5. Chatlog 05-01-3430-2000

Chatlog 05-01-3430-2000

Arch: Hey…Are you there? 

Ana: Yes. 

Ana: ….I tend to be here. 

Arch: I just wanted to say, that lost episode of Parks and Rec you showed me was pretty great. 

Ana: It wasn’t lost. 

Ana: There are plenty of updated-format versions available. 

Arch: What?! I looked at the episode list on the school library. 

Arch: The whole season that episode is from has been lost for centuries. 

Ana: Completely untrue. 

Ana: I have the entire season in the original DVD formatting, but I can call it up on a screen at any time as well. 

Ana: They must censor it on Alexandria. 

Arch: Why would a whole season of an ancient bureaucratic epic need to be censored? 

Arch: What would be the point? 

Ana: Hm. 

Ana: Bobby Newport, the chief antagonist of that season, is a businessman who goes into politics. 

Ana: This was the period just before the Merger, when that was becoming more and more common. 

Ana: Anyway, much of the season focuses on him running against our heroine Leslie Knope, ultimately winning due to his family money. 

Ana: His victory is meant as a comment that money can corrupt government. 

Ana: That might rub some people on your planet the wrong way. 

Arch: Holy shit. 

Arch: ……… 

Arch: Do you ever wonder what the government on your planet is keeping from you? 

Ana: What are you talking about? It’s your government that censors media. 

Arch: Well yeah, but you don’t need actual censorship laws to suppress certain views. 

Arch: I’m assuming you still have money on your planet, right? 

Ana: Yes… 

Ana: I mean, 

Ana: yes. 

Ana: But that’s hardly the same ballgame. Not even the same goddamn sport! 

Arch: Is that another reference? 

Ana: Yes. 

Arch: What’s it from? 

Ana: A film from the year 1990 called Pulp Fiction. 

Ana: It was the first film in history to use the now-stereotypical “twist contest” trope. 

Arch: Oh, wow. Would you show it to me? 

[Ana is typing] 

Ana: …I could do that, yes. 

Arch: Though first, what I’d really like is to watch all of Parks and Rec. 

Ana: …all of it? 

Arch: Yeah, all of it. I have nothing better to do. 

Arch: And you seem like you have plenty of time on your hands too. 

Ana: Yes. 

[Ana is typing] 

[Ana is typing] 

[Ana is typing] 

Ana: I do, yes.


	6. Elizabeth

Elizabeth was thinking of reporting her roommate to her RA. Her screen, strapped onto the gravity-safe velcro strip at the foot of her bed, softly flickered on a projection of an Economics of Government reading. Meanwhile Arch’s, across the room and not attached to any surface at all, began to play the piece of classical synth music from the intro of that period drama they were obsessed with—it was probably their fifteenth episode of the day. Elizabeth hadn’t been there for all fifteen episodes, of course—she had friends to see—but Arch’s routine didn’t leave much to speculation. Elizabeth had been taking mental notes on it for her hypothetical meeting with the RA:  


“Sophomore Arch typically wakes up after I have already returned from afternoon classes. After making coffee, they use a custom preset they appear to have programmed into our drink dispenser themselves. I am aware this is against all regulations; trust me, I am aware. They use this custom preset to boil water without inserting a drink packet first, and then they take raw eggs they steal from the kitchen, raw eggs as in, with shells, and drop them into the water. They make hardboiled eggs that way. As I was watching them, they appeared to surmise I was interested in the process, and explained that that’s why they call them hardboiled eggs—because you boil them until they’re hard. I knew that. Or at least, I would have inferred it if I had thought about it. I definitely know that boiling is a way to cook things. But wait, they don’t need to be expelled; I’m sure we can come to some reasonable—“  


Elizabeth had to stop to remind herself that the conversation was a stress fantasy, and that she didn’t have to follow the imagined conversation where the RA found out about Arch’s illegal cooking through to the end. That would be the darkest timeline, she thought, remembering a literary passage from a gen-ed class she’d had to take the previous year. Arch couldn’t be expelled—Arch was the least awful roommate Elizabeth had ever had.  


Elizabeth had a few simple priorities when it came to roommates. These priorities essentially translated into wanting her roommate situation to simulate living alone as closely as possible. Arch fit these priorities perfectly. When they weren’t hacking the room’s technology for criminal purposes, all they really did was lay in bed, and either watched EM or talked to their girlfriend online. The only interruption would be when their only friend came over, though that friend was more than irritating enough to count for a few people. On those occasions Elizabeth got good results from headphones.  


In her attempts to keep Arch as satisfied as she was, Elizabeth had even been making a point of networking with Arch in her spare time, to make them feel more like their 10 square foot metal box[1] was becoming a home. She had of course extended social invitations to Arch that, if accepted, would bring them into her Poli-Biz circle, but you didn’t have to be the most skilled networker in the sophomore class—that is, Elizabeth—to see that Arch would never accept an invitation to a Poli-Biz mixer. Elizabeth had mastered the old “invitation you know the person will never accept, but which you still look friendly for giving, despite them knowing you know the gesture is meaningless” trick before she started taking estrogen.  


Elizabeth had also been showing Arch how much she valued them by not calling campus police on them for their egg shenanigans, or for any of their modifications to the devices in their room—she certainly hoped they were grateful to her. After all, they would be expelled if anyone found out what they’d done: not only had they been cooking,[2] they had made the room’s interface stop giving them its helpful reminders about sleep, hygiene, and class attendance. Now the OS's silence aided and abetted Arch’s lifestyle.  


Arch had also done something to the room’s computer-voice specs so the OS sounded like a politician from their home province. The politician was widely perceived by his electorate as cold and emotionless, and there was a joke online that he was a cyborg engineered as a top-secret artificial intelligence project by the government. Arch now called the interface by the politician’s name when they gave it commands, and laughed heartily at the responses they had programmed the AI to reply with. Elizabeth didn’t approve—she had often spent holidays at the politician’s houses, and her parents had even considered marrying her to one of his sons—but she only really put her foot down when Arch made the bathroom mirror and fridge door stop playing ads. Cooking was a victimless crime, but withholding ad revenue was just bad citizenship.  


Despite their differences in worldview, Elizabeth had never found it easier to get along with a roommate. Arch would never advance Elizabeth’s career, of course. Their family was wealthy enough to send them here, but Arch clearly didn’t plan on doing anything with their life that could help Elizabeth politically. But Arch could still serve a perfectly useful purpose by providing her with a living space free of messy social entanglements. She did enough entangling when she wasn’t at home, after all.  


Which was why the question of whether to report Arch was so delicate. If Arch just needed a little nudge back toward good mental health, then reporting them would be a good thing—it’d keep her roommate from developing any depression symptoms that might be inconvenient enough that they would cause Arch to drop out of school. However, if the RA actually took a look at Arch’s life, she might end up arresting them, or suggesting they take some time off from school to figure themselves out, the end result being Arch leaving.  


She didn’t know much about their RA, only that she was so tall and willowy that Elizabeth was sure she had grown up in space—she was over 6 and a half feet tall, with a waist that could fit inside Elizabeth’s waist several times. A physique like that only came from going through puberty in low gravity.[3] Elizabeth had heard that some people who grew up on space stations took special vitamins or hormonal treatments to keep them from getting too out of proportion. The RA clearly hadn’t. Elizabeth soothed her ego by imagining the ethereal RA down on Alexandria, blowing in the wind like a tumbleweed.  


If Arch got expelled, Elizabeth had plenty of friends within her major—of course she had friends in her major—who it could be a networking boon to live with, but she didn’t like the idea of living with a fellow Political Business student. Elizabeth had to deal with other Poli-Biz kids stabbing her in the back often enough without giving them the intimate access they needed to do it literally. She valued her Poli-Biz friendships, but Elizabeth had learned at her mother’s knee that trusting one’s friends wasn’t wise, and that it was best not to give friends compromising information about yourself, or to let them see your vulnerabilities, or to have fun with them when you were together.  


So Elizabeth kept her friendships sedate, discreet, and professional. One more reason why she was going to go far in this world. Of course, that was expected of a member of her family, but she meant to go above even those expectations. Meanwhile, Arch hadn’t even recognized her name when they were introduced, and that was just fine by Elizabeth.  


To give Arch some credit, Elizabeth had to admit that Eridani[4] was a common last name on any planet.[5] Elizabeth’s middle name, Alexandria, was also common since it was literally the planet she lived on—her parents were very patriotic, as was common among political families. And Elizabeth, one of the most milquetoast everyday names possible, was more common still. However, the name “Elizabeth Alexandria Eridani” had never felt common to her: as her mother had often reminded her, Elizabeth ruled the waves, Alexander ruled the world, and Eridani was the star that began humanity’s conquest of the universe.  


“You were born for Empire,[6] Lizzie,” her mother had told her at her bat mitzvah, and at her quinceñera, and at her American-style Sweet Sixteen ceremony—and she had believed it. After all, Elizabeth never dreamed of colonizing the stars, and they said Alexander ruled the world, but they only meant the known world, not the whole planet. Even Epsilon Eridani was one star among so many, while from her seat on the Alexandria Board of Directors Elizabeth’s mother influenced the fates of stars that weren’t even visible from Alexandria’s night sky.  


Elizabeth realized suddenly that that was wrong: her mother couldn’t actually determine the fates of stars that were invisible from Alexandria, since even the farthest star in the Outer Ring was close enough to have still been visible from Earth, as part of the constellation Gemini. She wrinkled her nose at the thought of Gemini Zhao, Arch’s annoying friend, and tried to get back to her Econ of Gov reading. Whether or not she decided to report her roommate, the hypothetical reporting would take place after her work for the night, not during, and it certainly wouldn’t take place as a series of increasingly ridiculous stress-fantasies. Elizabeth was becoming increasingly prone to stress fantasies…  


“American capitalism was always flawed,” she read, “because the government’s ability to regulate business practices put economics at odds with politics. American Imperialism had a primitive system of checks and balances, but business was not yet an official branch of government, meaning that instead of collaborating to increase productivity and growth, business officials were forced to beg politicians to do what was best for profit. This was done through socializing and tasteful bribes, which have always been a useful means for citizens to exercise their freedom of expression outside of voting.  


Meanwhile, the American Imperialist government had to legislate the economy without having direct input from business. This government, of course, was the same one that held hearings on abortion law without bothering to have any people capable of childbirth on the board. As we can see, government functions much more smoothly when the people most affected by a law have a say in writing that law.”  


Wait. Gem Zhao. Arch’s loud friend. She hadn’t come by in a couple weeks. And Arch certainly hadn’t gone out to see her. Sudden loss of interest in social activities was one of the red flags on the “Signs of Mental Health Decline” poster in the dining hall, next to the CPR information. It wasn’t as though Arch had ever truly been interested in social activities, but at least they had Gem and their girlfriend. Wait. When was the last time Arch had video-chatted with their girlfriend? Elizabeth tried to remember, but she just had so little interest in Arch, it was difficult to be sure. She was sure, though, that Zhao hadn’t been by for a couple weeks; she would have remembered that kind of disturbance.  


She glanced over at Arch, and saw that they had fallen asleep in the middle of their show, while eating a whole bowl of hardboiled eggs. A half eaten egg was still in Arch’s hand, the slightly-runny yolk oozing slowly onto their fingers. The yolk wasn’t supposed to look like that, Elizabeth reflected, they’re hard boiled eggs, you boil them until they’re hard… She remembered with a shock that people used to get sick from eating eggs that weren’t cooked properly. What if Arch wasn’t asleep? What if they were dead?! Elizabeth didn’t know how to treat salmonella poisoning! She didn’t even know if people were genetically able to get salmonella poisoning anymore!  


She tried to concentrate on the reading. There’s no evidence that they’re dead. I know they’re not dead. They’re clearly not dead. I would know if they were dead. They are not dead. They are not dead. They are not dead. She kept repeating that in her head, but in spite of herself she sat up and began to tiptoe across the room to see if Arch was dead. After a few agonizing moments of crouching progress across the room, to a soundtrack of the dialogue from Arch’s show (“No, Justin! My loneliness may be killing me, but after all…I still believe!”) she was peeping up at Arch, right next to their bed and prepared to duck under if Arch woke up. She relaxed as she watched Arch’s chest moving up and down with their breath, confirming that their runny egg had not claimed their life.  


There were random items of Arch’s all over the floor where she was squatting, and she couldn’t risk knocking them out of place, for fear Arch would notice. She leaned backward and crab-walked around them and back to her bed, glad she had been going above and beyond with her school-mandated exercise routine. She had even been afforded special expanded rations for meeting her muscle-mass goals for the quarter. A certain rude friend of Arch’s had laughed at her pride when she had mentioned it in an attempt to make conversation, but no matter—Elizabeth didn’t even want as many sugar credits as Gem Zhao had anyway. They would only exacerbate the physical differences between her and the willowy RA.  


When she reached her bed she scrambled back up onto it, taking care to act casual in case Arch was waking up. After a moment, she sighed resignedly— and switched her screen out of desktop mode, reshaping it to hand-held size and slipping it into her belt with her other devices. She picked up her designer tote-bag, loaded with a water bottle, makeup, and emergency respirator for low-oxygen drills, and headed out the door, leaving Arch alone. The egg debacle had proven it: things were getting out of hand. She had to get them…back in hand. Elizabeth grimaced at her mental phrasing—she had never been snappy with words like certain insufferable Outer Ringers she knew, but no matter. Elizabeth knew what she needed to do. She needed to make a doctor’s appointment back home for over the holiday break, and then she needed to find Gem Zhao.

Footnotes

1The floor rattily carpeted but still giving off a metal chill when you walked barefoot, stained linoleum around the kitchen area, velcro strips scattered on every surface for anti-gravity drills.[return to text]

2When they automated cars, many people were happy not to have to drive—but some stubbornly clung to the old ways, resolutely driving manually to work every day. It didn’t take very long for automated cars to prove their superiority over human drivers, especially once the trolley problem was solved by the brilliant ethics mathematician Yuri Chulenko. After that, dangerous professions like surgery and firefighting were automated for safety reasons as well, and finally, after 200,000 years of minor burns, cuts, and food poisonings, it was made illegal to cook without a license. Most houses don’t even have kitchens anymore in the 21st century sense of the word, since the test to get a cooking license involves a risotto section that weeds out almost everyone who tries.[return to text]

3Without gravity holding you down in space, your bones can spread out and twist around like a Gumbi doll, giving you elfin proportions. The downside is that your bones are much less dense, and you gain weight easily. Elizabeth’s RA, however, had clearly been keeping up with the recommended low-g exercise regimen.[return to text]

4 As in Epsilon Eridani, the star where Zhong Guo (aka China) settled during the first wave of space colonization. [return to text]

5When a country like China with billions of people and about 100 last names to go around picks up stakes and moves to the nearest star, Ellis Island’s got nothing on what happens next. Eeeeveryone wanted a name change. However, the Eridani family have made their name more distinctive: from the moment the new residents of Zhong Xinga started picking out their new zodiac in an alien sky, Elizabeth’s family had gotten a say on which animals made the cut.b  
a. Zhong Guo means “the Middle Kingdom;” Zhong Xing means “the Middle Star.”  
b. They ensured that the rooster, the fitting logo for their stellar-energy company, Empire, stayed on, but with a description suggesting those born in the year of the Rooster were sharp businessmen, when previously that had been more of a Rat thing.

[return to text]

6Empire, meaning the name of her parents’ company, as well as the concept of imperialism. See what she did there? [return to text]


	7. Chatlog 08-20-3430-2130

[excerpt begins]

Ana: Not many people know this, 

Ana: But in the first ten years or so of its existence, 

Ana: Social media was a huge threat to those in power. 

Ana: Do you know what the Arab Spring was? 

Arch: No, but you were planning to fix that, right? 

Ana: So imagine this: 

Ana: You are a young Egyptian. 

Arch: Done. 

Arch: It is accomplished. 

Ana: Hush. 

Ana: You live under a dictator who has ruled your country for your entire life. 

Ana: You will only escape him when he dies. 

Ana: But then: 

Ana: You get this new app on your screen. 

Ana: (portable screens have also only been around a few years. 

Ana: we literally can’t comprehend this change. 

Ana: we can more easily imagine a world without fire. 

Ana: i mean, i haven’t seen a flame anywhere but in a chemistry class… 

Ana: but anyway.) 

Ana: Now you can check out what people in the nearby American Empire are up to with their free speech. 

Ana: Instead of overthrowing their government, Americans mainly use these technologies for blood sport and sexual gratification. 

Ana: But even though the Americans aren’t doing much with it, now you have free speech too! 

Ana: And you fucking use it! 

Arch: Whoa, Kepler, language. 

Ana: You curse all the time, Arch. 

Arch: Yeah, I know. That was a joke. 

Arch: The joke was based on the fact that while I curse all the time, you never do. 

Ana: Oh. I get it. 

Ana: Anyway. 

Ana: If you include countries where there were major protests, there were twenty nations in all involved in the Arab Spring. 

Ana: That’s ten percent of all the countries there were at that time! 

Ana: For six months, ten percent of the world was going through revolutions or major upheavals, 

Ana: all because of a technology that had been invented to collect data for advertising and sell people games involving animated birds. 

Arch: So there were two hundred countries at that time?! That’s insane! 

Ana: THAT’S the most insane thing you’ve taken away from this?! 

Arch: The rest was also extremely insane. 

Arch: But like, how did all those countries even get along? 

Ana: They didn’t. 

Arch: Oh. 

Arch: Hm……. 

Arch: You know, when you talk about history like this, it’s actually pretty fun to read. Why don’t you write like this in your forum posts? 

Ana: You think I should write my critiques like that?! 

Ana: No no no, a paper using curse words and colloquial phrasing would never be respected in academia. 

Ana: I’m not talking about academia, I’m talking about internet discussions about soap operas for teens. They’re very different things. 

Arch: No they’re not! 

Arch: I just feel like if you talked more like, you know, a person, people online might like you more. 

Arch: Instead of using your posts as copypastas. 

Ana: I can’t believe I thought that person had plagiarized me at first. 

Ana: Also, getting people to like me isn’t the point. 

Ana: I don’t make forum posts about historical inaccuracies in tv shows to be liked. 

Arch: But you seem sad that people don’t like your critiques. 

Arch: After that copypasta thing you barely posted anything for three weeks. 

Arch: Don’t think I didn’t notice! 

Ana: I was not sad. 

Ana: They’re the ones that should be sad! 

Ana: They don’t get to better understand the socio-political underpinnings of Britney Spears’ career! 

Arch: ……. 

[Arch is typing] 

Ana: I understand what you mean, Arch. 

Ana: Your advice is sound. 

Ana: However, it does not match up with my priorities. 

Ana: Even if there were a part of me that wanted to be liked, 

Ana: —and I’m not saying there is— 

Ana: that part of me should not be indulged. 

Ana: Especially not if it would mean compromising my academic integrity. 

Ana: After all, if I don’t have that, what do I have? 

Arch: Aw. 

Arch: Well, I respect that. 

Arch: And for what it’s worth, even if you didn’t have your academic integrity, you would still have me. 

Arch: ……….. 

[Ana is typing] 

[Ana is typing] 

Ana: I appreciate that. 

Arch: I appreciate that you appreciate it. 

Ana: ……… 

Ana: So, what kind of colloquial language do you mean, exactly? 

Ana: I’m not saying I’m considering the idea. 

Ana: I just want to understand your position on the matter better. 

Ana: After all, even in the most incorrect claims, sometimes insight can be found. 

Ana: ……… 

Ana: Arch? Are you there?? 

Arch: Hey! Yeah I’m here! 

Arch: And I have a question. 

Arch: I guess now it’s me initiating a pointless argument about history. How the turn tables. 

Arch: Gem and I have been arguing about this all night— 

Arch: I’ve told you about Gem, right? 

Arch: She’s been my best friend here ever since she moved to Alexandria from Pollux system, and we’ve decided we’re going to go to college together! 

Ana: Is she the friend who sneaks you chocolate? 

Arch: Yes, thankfully. Or else I would probably die. 

Arch: Anyway, Gem is writing a paper on Reinhard Chopra and the Golden Age of Bollywood. 

Arch: She wants to talk about how propaganda works on India. 

Arch: Media would have been restricted in some pretty unique ways, right? 

Ana: Restricted how? 

Ana: None of the Inner Ring planets have restrictions in the way you must understand it on Alexandria. 

Arch: Yeah, not restrictions in the sense of government censorship. 

Arch: Gem means in the sense of oligopolistic networks whose control over communications gives them effective censorship powers, 

Arch: Even when they act like they’re selecting media based on merit or profit. 

Arch: (I keep telling you, you don’t need to live under fascism to live under fascism.) 

Ana: Hmph. 

Ana: Anyway, continue. 

Arch: So, India’s golden age was like four hundred years ago, and while they were super close trade partners with Germany a couple lightyears away they had kept their culture weirdly similar to the way it had been on Earth. 

Arch: Possibly because of the original Bollywood! (Gem says) 

Arch: Reinhard Chopra wanted his studio to be all about Indian culture; he wanted to revive Earth’s Bollywood. 

Arch: Gem reasons that India being a nation state should have made their media less popular on other planets, 

Arch: Because they weren't making movies that were relatable to the Pan-Arab Union or Deutschwelt, 

Arch: But then she shows that it was greater artistic freedom that allows India to export their culture to other cultures. 

Ana: I might not be the best person to ask about this. 

Ana: After all, I study Earth history, not Indian history. 

Arch: Yeah but…you live there. 

Ana: Yes, but what I mean is that I am not currently earning a degree in the subject, 

So my opinions are closer to being of equal weight to the average person’s in this area. 

Arch: Closer to being of equal weight, huh? 

Arch: You almost sounded humble there. 

Arch: Or closer to being humble, anyway. 

Ana: I typically don’t have cause to be humble. 

Ana: This is a heavily-documented fact. 

Ana: ;) 

Ana: But back to Gem’s paper: where do you disagree with her here? 

Arch: I just don’t think it has anything to do with India's political structure. 

Arch: After all, Alexandrian media is all about Alexandrian culture! 

Arch: E.g. its anti-intellectual devaluing of Inner Ring academics, 

Arch: or its disdain for “uncivilized” Outer Ring colonists! 

Arch: And we're like, corp-core. 

Arch: Corporations on corporations. 

Arch: There's basically no "state" part of the government, just the corporation. 

Ana: But of course, Alexandria only really markets to Alexandria. 

Ana: It is a very, very special case. 

Arch: Yeah, which is why Gem doesn’t accept it as evidence. 

Arch: Problem is, the first wave of colonies doesn’t really count since they couldn’t exchange culture basically at all without interstellar high speed internet, 

Arch: then the second wave is the one we’re talking about where Indian media is dominant, 

Arch: and then there’s Alexandria! 

Arch: To see if there’s a pattern we’ll have to wait a generation or two to see how the fourth wave’s media structure shakes out, meaning that Gem and I will be arguing for our entire lives. 

Arch: Though it’s not like that wasn’t going to happen anyway. 

Ana: I thought you tended not to have opinions. 

Arch: About little things like where I go to college or what career I go into, nah, no opinions at all. 

Arch: But Gem and I have built our whole friendship on supporting each other’s mental illnesses, and disagreeing with all claims the other makes about pop culture. 

Arch: Or as you would say: we’re here to disagree with each other and support each other’s mental health, and we’re all out of mental health. 

Ana: Glad to see I’ve introduced you to a little culture in the time we’ve known each other. 

Ana: ….. 

Ana: Wait. You said you had been arguing with Gem all evening—but we have been talking all evening. 

Arch: Well yeah, but I’ve been talking to her too. She’s right across the room working on a paper. 

Ana: So you’ve been talking to her at the same time, for our entire conversation? 

Arch: Yeah! I mean, I do that all the time! 

Ana: ……. 

Ana: I see. 

Arch: Gem’s cool. I feel like you two would get along. 

Ana: You said she’s the one who sneaks you candy? 

Arch: Yeah! 

Arch: She’s also the one who’s always reading paper books because they’re “””edgy,””” 

Arch: and the one who lives alone because of her OCD, 

Arch: and the one who likes to wear headphones to the gym but then just listens to other people’s conversations while pretending not to be able to hear! 

Arch: Really, whenever I’ve ever told you a story about a friend, that story is about Gem, 

Arch: because Gem is my only friend! 

Arch: I mean, except for you; you're also my friend. 

Ana: ……. 

Ana: I see. [excerpt ends]


	8. Gem

Since most looks she got at Alexandria University were on the unfriendly side, Gem enjoyed the envious glances she attracted when she put down a tray in a dining hall. Today she’d loaded her tray with a plate of french toast[1] left over from breakfast, with even more sugar to go with it, in the form of a large glass of chocolate soy milk. All this accompanied the modest bowl of lentil-chickpea curry most people around her had, though with an extra samosa, where the average student only had the carb credits for one. 

As Gem sat and put down her bag, a group of pre-pro[2] students down the table from her couldn’t seem to take their eyes off her food—they probably hadn’t seen an extra portion of sugar the whole time they’d been in college. The stereotype that programmers tended not to be physically fit was so old, she doubted even Arch’s little girlfriend knew when it had begun. 

Gem tucked into the slabs of fried sugar in front of her with gusto. Her upbringing on a long distance spaceship had done some weird things to her psyche, to say the least, but she had been doing a low-gravity exercise regimen since before she could talk, so the fitness-for-food incentive structure at AU was quite literally a cakewalk for her. 

It really wasn’t hard to get decent amounts of sugar and carbs, though—if you were in the yellow, or even the lighter orange, areas of the Fitness Bar® graphic displayed in all the AU dining halls, you could eat non-fruit sugar every few days, and carbs for most meals. Gem, in the most verdant green of the topmost level, often had to “redistribute” sugar to her red-alert level best friend, since Arch started crying if they went too long without chocolate and would never get it often enough if they had to depend on their own rations. She had grabbed a few candy bars to add to her “Arch stash” already. 

Sometimes Gem’s food situation was weird: every now and then there would be a dinner for the fittest students, where the administration would treat them to some exotic unhealthy food, like crepes or ice cream. That meant socializing with a tableful of try-hards for a night, who were usually the same grating bunch of Poli-Biz or EM majors who got on the leaderboards trying to stay hot for when they got famous. When she walked into the room they would all give her a wondering look, perplexed that a girl who wore Gem’s shapeless black clothes, spoke with an Pollux accent, and who never ran for either federal or local student government, had found her way into the same room as them. 

But Gem had never cared whether or not people thought she was weird—that was why she purposely cultivated a persona that made people think she was weird. Instead of stuffing her luggage with clothes like many students, she had used the space for a selection of over a hundred paper books. Most people thought Gem’s paper books were a pretentious affectation. That was because they were. 

She pulled one of them out of her bag now and began to read, managing eating and turning pages with practiced motions. She smirked, and read, and ate, glancing up every now and then at the stars through the Eridani Atrium’s ceiling.[3]

It occurred to Gem that it must cost a fortune to light and heat the Eridani Atrium what with its hundred foot tall ceiling and all—the price must be ASTRONOMICAL, she thought, letting out a snort of laughter and doing finger guns across the table even though no one was there. She knew, though, that the Eridanis were not a subtle family, so they probably took it as a further point of pride how much they were costing the school to flaunt their name and power. 

Gem put the Eridanis out of her mind and returned to her book—a novelization of the late-Earth-period film Suicide Squad. Just holding it made her feel more intellectual. The film itself was based on early comic tradition, though the novelization, originally written as a promotion for the film’s release, abandoned that feel in favor of a more cinematic narrative flow. 

The book’s pages were made of pulped hemp, molded and flattened out into sheets thinner than glass. She could feel the plant-like roughness as she rubbed one between her fingers; gently, so it wouldn’t rip. The letters, stamped onto the pages in dark ink, stood out against the white, but in a soft, dim way rather than with the searing contrast of a screen. Gem always found herself leaning closer to her books, and squinting slightly, still unused to text that didn’t blast itself into her head at the speed of light. 

Gem saw the limitations of print, obviously—limited definition and color quality for images, and no video or gifs at all, meaning only stories told through text alone worked as books. But it was fascinating to think how humans on Earth held these, some on a daily basis, and had nothing else going on but that one story for as long as they were reading it. Calls and web notifications were unable to reach books, because paper didn’t have internet. Unless the person reading actually put the book down to check their devices, they wouldn’t know anything about what was happening online. Nothing could interrupt you, if you were reading a book! 

“Sophomore Zhao?” 

Gem had forgotten that real-life human beings could still interrupt you, no matter what you were doing. The formal mode of address startled Gem out of her usual abrasive manner, and she looked up from her book with a simple “Yes?” 

She regretted her politeness as soon as she saw who it was. The authoritative manner and use of her rank had made her think of station security or the student police,[4] but it was just Arch’s roommate. “My name isn’t ‘Sophomore,” she added with a sneer. 

“Ah. Right. Well. Good to be connecting with you, er…Gem.” Her name sounded unnatural in Elizabeth’s mouth. 

“My name is Gemini.”[5] Gem only made people she hated call her Gemini. In truth, she didn’t prefer Gemini—she didn’t even like it that much. But her primary motivation in most human interactions was spite. 

“Gemini.” Gem could smell Elizabeth’s distaste at the Outer-Ring name as she said it. 

Gem left Elizabeth hanging, not continuing the conversation past the grudging pronunciation of her name. As Elizabeth realized Gem didn’t plan to say anything, her facial muscles, which had been forming a cordial, condescending smile, began to tighten in some places and droop in others. Gem didn’t even blink. She cared so little about what Elizabeth thought of her that she forced her eyes to stay open for the entire awkward silence, to make sure Elizabeth knew how little she cared. 

“I need to talk to you.” Elizabeth finally said. Gem tilted her head, meaning, “start talking then.” Kind of like a hardboiled detective would in a movie. Or Harrison Ford. Yeah. Harrison Ford. Gem had always identified with Han Solo. Did that make Arch Chewbacca? 

While Gem was fantasy-casting Star Wars, the Alexandrian was taking the liberty of sitting down at Gem’s table, surreptitiously glancing around for people she knew. Elizabeth had clearly gotten the best prenatal vitamins and growth hormones, plus she had probably gotten to start her estrogen the moment she started trying on dresses as a child, but there was something fragile and birdlike about the girl that belied her well-cultivated health. Her eyes popped for a second when she noticed Gem’s food. 

“That looks like a nice lunch. It must have cost a lot of sugar credits.” She was dropping her decorum with envy. 

“Yeah, I work out.” Gem took a disinterested slurp of chocolate milk. “You said you needed to talk to me?” 

“Yes. I do.” Gem got why this girl and Arch got along as tolerably as they seemed to. Elizabeth seemed about as interested in casual social interaction as Arch. She wondered how that played out in her weird Poli-Biz networking club—though maybe Elizabeth was only this disinterested in people like Arch and Gem. “Have you seen Arch lately?” 

“Are they missing?” Gem was taken aback. Arch had always tended to disappear every now and then, but not literally. Not physically. 

“No.” Elizabeth spoke haltingly, as if she wasn’t fluent in the language they were speaking, and she resented Gem for insisting their conversation be conducted in such a crude tongue. “They’re in our room. But they haven’t been doing very much. Mainly watching TV, and sleeping. They were asleep when I left just now; I…checked.” 

“Are you saying you watch them sleep?” 

“Well, they’re right across the room from me, so I can’t really help it. I also owe it to Arch, and myself, to notice when they aren’t functioning at their usual level.” Elizabeth said, switching back into her Poli-Biz networking-speak. She had totally failed to register Gem’s humor, just like Arch had described.[6]

“So what’s the problem?” Gem didn’t have time to explain what depression was to someone whose biggest problem probably involved picking outfit colors to signal affiliation and allyship with different political factions. But at her question Elizabeth looked more uncomprehending than ever. 

“I just thought this would concern you. Aren’t you their friend?” 

Gem let out a phff of frustration, blowing a fringe of bangs out of her face. “You don’t understand…this just happens sometimes. It’s been a couple weeks now; I usually barge in demanding to watch a show with them or something after three.” Gem tried not to be a helicopter mom-friend. 

“And does a show help them? They’ve been watching a show this whole time, and it doesn’t seem to have helped at all.” 

“No, silly, it’s not the show that helps them, it’s the friendship.” Gem said, before remembering Elizabeth wouldn’t understand the meta-sincerity. 

“Well, if that will help…then I think you should come over.” 

Gem ticked an eyebrow upward. “So, you’re inviting me over?” 

“I’m not. I’m arranging this for Arch, because something seems to be wrong.” 

Elizabeth was overreacting, of course. Arch just disappeared sometimes; that was just how depression worked. It obviously wasn’t good, but it was reality. However, Gem had to admit this was the first time a roommate of Arch’s had ever seemed to care. That meant something, even if she was some kind of plastic robotic dynasty-politician with nothing in common with Gem or Arch. 

“Okay.” she said. She stuffed the last bit of french toast in her mouth. “One second.” 

“Oh, you’re coming over now?!” A ripple went over Elizabeth’s regained composure. 

Gem drank the rest of the chocolate milk like she was doing a shot. “What, is the place a mess? I’ve been hanging out in Arch’s depression cocoons for like six years, it’s no problem.” 

She put her tray into retrieval mode; it quietly hummed as it lifted off and ponderously floated over toward the kitchens. Gem then pulled out a wet wipe from the box she had left open on the bench next to her for just this moment, carefully avoiding touching the box itself with her food-tainted hands. Only the hand she had been eating with had really been dirty, the “book hand” having stayed clean to turn pages, but she used the wipe on both hands just for thouroughness’s sake. 

“No, er, it’s fine for you to come over now.” Elizabeth’s distaste as she watched Gem’s OCD ritual would have been more appropriate if Gem had been slathering the food onto herself instead of cleaning it off. “I just have an Economics of Government reading to finish, so if you could keep your friendship to a courteous level of noise, I would appreciate it.” 

Gem took another wipe and cleaned around her mouth. “We’ll try. Now come on—we’re going to pick up some food for Arch first, and you might as well help me carry it all.” She grabbed her bag and headed off after her hovering tray, back toward the kitchens. 

“Carry it all? How many sugar credits do you have?!” 

Footnotes

1French toast was a dish originally made by soaking bread in cow’s milk (soy or coconut milk is now the standard) and eggs (omitted if chickens aren’t available), and then frying it. Contrary to the name, it was common across Earth’s Europe dating back to the Roman Empire, and has been called Spanish toast, German toast, eggy bread (England) and even Bombay toast. All in all, a much more international dish than the name suggests. 

2Pre-Programming. Computer work requires enough years of training that it’s a grad school game, but there are courses you take in undergrad to prepare for the entrance tests. Computer science masters programs are all highly competitive, and involve stringent non-disclosure agreements to keep potentially subversive programming knowledge safely in the hands of the state. Even on Alexandria, though, that’s not entirely possible, so there are still plenty of people out there who, by leaks or through their own experimentation, have as much computer knowledge as a PhD, or in some cases (Arch) a lot more. 

3The Berenice Reagan Eridani Atrium was a large common space on Centaurian station that opened onto a breathtaking view of the void through a dome of 50 foot thick glass panels, held together by girders of synthesized diamond that glittered in a spiderweb like a second Milky Way above Gem’s head. Alexandria’s surface was often visible below, and depending on the orbits of all the bodies involved, sometimes the other stations making up the university orbited so close Gem had intrusive catastrophic fantasies about the Eridani Atrium dome shattering in on them all, before the vaccuum of space sucked them out into the black. 

4Or, even worse, the student secret police. 

5 Gem’s home star Pollux, when viewed from Earth, was part of a constellation that early humans had called Gemini, and at the time she was born her mother had just been appointed ambassador to Alexandria, so she had been named for the star system her parents were about to leave behind for the rest of their lives.

The psychiatrists she had seen at her stupid Alexandria boarding school theorized that the stresses of takeoff and anti-gravity on her growing body could have induced her OCD through trauma. Her parents, of course, hadn’t liked that answer, especially since it didn’t involve a way to make Gem not have OCD anymore, so that avenue had gone less-than-fully explored during her short and ill-fated course of therapy. 

6 While Gem had had a few (unwanted) interactions with Elizabeth since Arch had moved in—enough to know her phone-operator tone of voice and phone-tree style of conversation—she only knew of Elizabeth’s weirder mannerisms from Arch’s anecdotes. Among them was extremely optimal posture, and total incomprehension of comical insincerity—sarcasm, irony, post-irony, and the more fringe “meta-sincerity” movement were all lost on her.


	9. Chatlog 06-20-3431-2130

Chatlog 06-20-3431-0400

Ana: Well. There you have it. The entirety of Parks and Recreation. 

Arch: I’m still crying 

Ana: Oh. I am sorry. 

Arch: No, don’t be! 

Arch: I’m just so happy for Jerry…he always deserved better, and…aND THEN HE GOT IT 

Ana: An excellent catharsis, yes. 

Arch: Phew. Sorry; I just haven’t had much sugar lately. 

Arch: I told you about that whole thing, right? How my school does space rations for upperclassmen to prepare them for college in space? 

Ana: Yes, I’ve been aware. 

Arch: Well, Gem is away on college visits, so she hasn’t been able to sneak me snacks this week. 

Ana: Unfortunate. 

Ana: Question: are you going on any college visits in the near future? 

Ana: And are you considering anywhere in the Inner Ring? 

Arch: Oh, nowhere that far. That’d be insane! 

Ana: …. 

Arch: Besides, I think Gem doesn’t want to go any deeper into human civilization than she already is. 

Arch: Since Gem knows a lot more about space living than me, she’s got a lot of opinions. 

Arch: And I, as you know, don’t tend to have opinions, almost ever. 

Ana: Ah yes; she was en route to Alexandria for most of her childhood, yes? 

Ana: I thought all the other planets in the Middle Ring had been destroyed by the Bug…did she grow up on a space station? 

Arch: Oh nooooo, she’s not from a space station or a dead planet; her family is from Pollux system! They left when she was four! 

Ana: Oh my. What was that like? 

Arch: Pretty weird, from what she tells me. 

Arch: Like, the kind of weird that makes her very grateful she was already toilet trained before they left. 

Ana: I see. I have been researching space living conditions to prepare for college, and I gather the adjustment is challenging. 

Arch: Very, from what I hear. 

Arch: But hey, instead of asking me about Gem, why don’t you ask Gem about Gem?! 

Ana: Pardon? 

Arch: I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before! 

Arch: After all, we’ve gotten so close, 

[Arch is typing] 

[Arch is typing] 

Arch: you know, since we’ve been doing this, 

Arch: and I bet you and Gem would get along great! 

Ana: You mean, I would…befriend her as well? 

Arch: Yeah! 

Arch: And then all of us can hang out online! Together! All at once! 

Ana: I can see the benefit for you, to have all your friends centralized in such a way. 

Ana: But…I have never taken well to new people. 

Ana: After all, recall how I first came off to you. 

Arch: But then when I got to know you I found out that you’re amazing! 

[Arch is typing] 

[Arch is typing] 

[Arch is typing] 

Arch: Anyway, I’m sure when you meet Gem, you’ll begrudgingly reveal the good heart behind your clinical, pedantic exterior to her, just like you did to me! 

Ana: Mm… 

Arch: And she’ll reveal the good heart behind her whole confrontational, edgier-than-thou thing! 

Arch: It’ll be great! 

Ana: I am unsure…we have a good system now, after all; 

Ana: if Gem’s addition hindered our pursuits rather than adding to them, 

[Ana is typing] 

Ana: I would regret it. 

Arch: Your clinical, pedantic exterior is showing. 

Ana: Heh. 

Ana: It’s hard out here for a pedant.


	10. Arch

_Hey. I know you don’t want to talk to me right now, but I just wanted to let you know that I’m here when you do want to, and also that I love you. Bye <3_

Arch hoped Ana didn’t have the message thread between them open at the moment. If she did, she would have been able to sit there in her spartan dorm room and watch the words [Arch is typing] flashing for the past hour as they typed her conciliatory messages without sending them.

They could see her now, sitting cross-legged at the foot of her bed with its military-surplus sheets, wrapped in several blankets and facing a vindow[1] to the moon’s surface. The sheet-metal walls around her would be bare, instead of covered up with a more homey plaster like on AU, and posterless just as the the floor was carpetless.

Ana and Arch’s chat thread would probably be open on Ana’s personal screen, along with a few dozen other tabs. Her school screen, for copyrighted or otherwise censored documents, would be open nearby with its own dozens of tabs. She had remapped her computer’s controls to imitate the clumsy manual interfacing of her beloved 21st century, so she would signal her screens to scroll and switch tabs with wide, flourishing swipes in place of the minimal finger twitches most people used.

While they figured it would be fun to have to wave your hands around like a magician to make your tech work, Arch grimaced at the thought of having to touch a physical screen—and they couldn’t even imagine Gem interfacing with a device by rubbing patterns on a big square of oil and dirt. Hell, Ana would probably hate it too—while she romanticized the Carbon Age, she would probably enjoy having to swipe and type on physical objects about as much as she would enjoy getting HIV, or using paper in the bathroom instead of a water jet. Gross.

Speaking of gross, Ana would probably be drinking one of those Victuquick™ meal-smoothies every space station carried in addition to solid food; her usual studying/ brooding snack. They were mainly for emergencies, like if the hydroponic system that grew a station’s food was down. Not only did Ana genuinely like the taste (?!?!), she also used them as easy, long-lasting nutrition when she had forgotten to eat for a long period of time, or simply didn’t want to take the time away from her work to get food. Arch ungenerously wondered how much of that “I’m just too brilliant an intellectual to spend time on basic bodily needs” shtick was affected—and whether Ana even knew anymore.

Arch had only recently learned that Elizabeth’s family owned the company that made those Victuquick™ drinks. They thought of what it meant to have the patent on a formula that was printed by stations all over human civilization. The money. The power. The Eridanis could take back permission to use their products from anyone, at any time. If they decided to get into “the military industry”—as Elizabeth would probably call a war of conquest if she were waging one—they would be able to revoke part of their enemies’ food supply.

Luckily, with most planets a generation ship away, war was pretty rare these days.

A fifteen second ad started playing on Arch’s screen, locking their windows and interrupting their thoughts. Elizabeth had been scandalized when Arch suggested turning them off (even though it would be so easy to disable them!). Arch sighed as the little cartoon characters in the ad capered around a corporate logo. These things were much harder to sit through knowing it would be the work of an hour or two to get rid of them permanently.

Their door banged open, interrupting the interruption. Wow, that’s a more energetic entrance than usual. Elizabeth must have gotten some really bitching networking done this afternoon, Arch thought dully. They didn’t turn around until Gem smacked the screen out of their hands.

“Get in, loser, we’re going shopping!”[2] Gem smirked. The colors of the ad flickered on her face. Arch’s screen went into dropped mode and steadied itself in midair, unharmed.

“Oh, hey Gem.” Arch hadn’t expected Gem to forcibly intrude for another few days. Aw, she was worried about me. “If you came to make me watch a show with you, can it please not be Riverdale again?”

“But you love Riverdale, Archiekins.”

“The nickname Archiekins is the exact reason I hate Riverdale. How can Archie be a kin of himself? What excess of the Tumblr era is that?!” Arch shook their head. “But fine. Let’s do this.”

“I didn’t actually come to watch Riverdale—I’ve got a proposition that’s a bit more Breaking Bad.” Gem adopted a gravelly voice and a 21st-century accent: “Arch. We need to cook.”

“My, we’re cultured today.”

“I guess Outer Ringers aren’t a bunch of frontier savages after all.” Gem smirked, or rather intensified her ever-present smirk, and stood, looking expectantly at Elizabeth, who had been standing by the door like a guest who hadn’t been invited to sit down. Elizabeth was holding a lumpy bag and looking down the hallway furtively.

“Evening, Arch.” Elizabeth primly greeted them. “I happened to run into Gemini at the cafeteria—“ she stopped; Arch had snickered at Gem’s full name. “What?”

Arch looked at Gem, who just raised her eyebrows and said, “Yeah, what’s your problem, Arch?”

“Nothing.” Arch grinned. “How did Gem talk you into stealing from the cafeteria?”

“I guess I should thank you for not reporting us.” Gem remarked casually.

“No need to thank me. I suppose rules can be broken for a good cause.” Elizabeth and Gem smiled at each other for a second, which was about a second longer than Arch would have guessed they would ever smile at each other. Weird, but okay, thought Arch.

“What was the good cause?” they asked.

Gem and Elizabeth looked at Arch, then each other, then both started talking at once. Gem won out with, “The cause of liberating these potatoes from being made into awful cafeteria food, obviously.”

“Yes, exactly. That is exactly what I was going to say.” Elizabeth smiled at Gem yet again. Arch held their breath to see how long the moment would continue. Unfortunately, Elizabeth opened her mouth again, to say: “Though of course, the good people who own the food companies work very hard to ensure quality—“

“WELL, ANYWAY, guess we should get to cooking, Archiekins!” Gem clapped her hands, and Elizabeth’s expression, which was set in what Arch had come to know as her “explaining smile,” withered on the vine. Gem stood and crossed to the kitchen; as she snagged the potatoes out of Elizabeth’s hands she remarked, “You might want to turn up the volume on your Businessy Business reading if you don’t want to be an accomplice to cooking.”

“It’s an Economics of Government reading, and I assure you I will.” said Elizabeth through her teeth. She moved back to her side of the room, arranging herself on her bed and spreading out her screen at a height and angle just-so to optimize her posture. Maybe a bit more ramrod straight than usual. Arch made a mental note to find out what a ramrod was. Ana might know…but they could find out on their own. They made another mental note to finish that consolatory message to Ana, though.

As Gem retrieved and began washing a cafeteria knife that she had whittled sharp—their chief cooking accessory—Arch glanced back at Elizabeth. The mirror image of her reading was scrolling down her face as she crisply manipulated her screen with a well-manicured finger. But as Arch watched, a flicker of something else scrolled over her face, and was gone in an instant.

Arch got to the kitchen counter and took the knife, which they called a multitool and Gem called a shank, from Gem. They were about to speak when Gem reached over and touched their hand, shocking them into silence—Gem hated touching other humans even more than she hated touching food. “I’m glad you’re back.” Gem whispered. Her voice was thick and wobbly, which surprised Arch even more—Gem hated crying even more than she hated touching other humans.

Arch was touched, figuratively as well as literally, and felt their own eyes begin to prickle in response. But they had had enough of crying the past couple weeks. They squeezed Gem’s hand back, then said: “Why are we whispering?”

“Fuck off.” Gem playfully shoved Arch’s hand away.

Arch knew they weren’t imagining the feeling of attention on them from the other bed. The drop in volume must have piqued Elizabeth’s curiosity.

Arch always got to know their roommates’ habits pretty well—it came with the territory of spending days at a time in bed and rarely sleeping. In boarding school, where the social sphere was smaller, Arch’s roommates were always trading them in for someone more popular; they were still surprised Elizabeth hadn’t done that, though maybe she couldn’t find anyone. Arch had had a wide range of roommates, at least two each year and once as many as six. All of them had had a few general things in common: diurnal sleep schedules, no desire to befriend Arch, and friend groups who Arch got to know, from Arch’s roommates inviting them over to hang out and study together.

The thing was, while Elizabeth was always going out to Poli-Biz mixers and networking events, she had never, in the six weeks they had lived together, had a friend over just to hang out. (Arch had looked on her social media, but you can’t tell anything about a person’s real life from that, obviously.)

“Say Elizabeth,” they said at full volume as Gem’s eyebrows shot up, “want to cook with us?”

When Elizabeth froze out of surprise, she froze down to the last muscle. “Did…you need a third person for some step of the process?” she finally asked.

“No, I just thought you might like to help us make dinner, and eat with us! After all, you helped with the, ahem, grocery shopping.” Arch grinned.

Elizabeth looked confused. “But we stole the food.”

***

“So: the potato served as a staple starch for almost all of the planet Earth by the time of the exodus, but it wasn’t actually introduced to the majority of humanity until the mid-second millennium, when the Spanish brought potatoes back to Europe after conquering the Incan Empire. Like a lot of things Europeans stole from non-Europeans—such as rock music, pasta, and corn—the potato was soon thought of as a white people thing, specifically an Irish thing. What’s Irish, you ask? Well, it all started—“

“Is this supposed to be part of the recipe?” Gem interrupted. “Too much history in my diet tends to make me gassy.” She was leaning against the kitchen counter, watching Arch brandish one of the potatoes at Elizabeth. Elizabeth was just staring at the potato, as if it was that specific potato that had been stolen by the Spanish.[3]

“You’re no fun.” But Arch hefted the potato bag onto the counter, signalling the start of the more practical portion of the cooking lesson. “So: we’re going to cook some mashed potatoes. First, we need to wash these as best we can in the bathroom sink, and cut them into pieces with this thing here, which I call a multitool and Gem calls a shank. Once that’s done, I’ll show you the next step.”

They offered the multitool/ shank to Elizabeth. One side of it was sharpened into a passable cutting edge, and the other was whittled down to be some kind of poking or prodding instrument, which they often used for stirring. Arch supposed it was more of a duotool than a multitool, and made a mental note to get a second cafeteria knife and strap it to this one somehow, bumping up the total tool count to four. Though they might get in the way of each other… They’d work out the specifics later.

“How illegal is this process going to get?” Elizabeth wasn’t taking the multitool; she looked like she wanted to go back to her Economics of Government reading.

“Weeeeell,” Gem rubbed her chin. “I mean, we’re already cooking without a license; that’s a planetary crime. It doesn’t get much more illegal than that. Does that make you feel better?”

“No.”

“Come on guys.” Arch broke in. “This is a fun friend communal cooking gathering, just like in an American sitcom! We’re going to cook these potatoes, it’s going to be a great and fun time, and we’re going to feel all warm and full and socially bonded after we’ve eaten them, like our ancestors did every night on Earth. No need to think about work camps or exile to the colonies if we get caught.”

“Um, the colonies? You mean the Outer Ring?”

“I believe they said the colonies.” Elizabeth did a smile that she could probably develop into a smirk with daily practice. Arch felt a rush of sardonic pride, though as Elizabeth carried a handful of potatoes off to the bathroom to wash, Gem gave her a glare Arch knew didn’t bode well.

***

After chopping the potatoes, Arch showed Elizabeth how to take a panel off the side of their drink dispenser to get at the water tank inside. Arch’s wheelhouse was software hacking, but they were only limited in their “hardware hacking” by their significant lack of physical strength. They bought some precious good humor from Gem by asking her to do most of the work of prying off the unscrewed panel; Gem smugly pulled up her sleeves so she could show off her chiseled delts while she did it.

Arch then set the drink machine to “hot water.” Since it only took five minutes to boil, they had to re-set it every five minutes for the next half hour to fully cook the potatoes. They had reset it for the third time (fifteen minutes having passed, making the potatoes halfway done) when the night began a gradual turn for the worse:

“Hey Arch, remember that time senior year when you managed to access the data file that kept track of everyone’s food credits, and gave yourself a bunch of sugar credits so you could have chocolate more often?”

They were sitting on the floor in a circle while they waited. Gem had been bringing up anecdotes from when she and Arch were in high school—it was almost like she was trying to make their conversation inaccessible to anyone who wasn’t the two of them. “But then even though you hadn’t given yourself very many sugar credits at all,” she continued, “the cafeteria workers knew that there was no way you should even have that many, and reported you for fraud!”

“And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids.” Arch said solemnly.

“I never understood that expression…” Elizabeth mused.

“I’m sure Ana would know where it came from.” Gem looked at Arch. “Ana’s a senior now, right? Her thesis will probably look like a David Foster Wallace book.”

“What? Why?” Arch was confused enough at this that they barely noticed the adrenaline rush when Gem mentioned Ana.

“You know, it’ll have a lot of footnotes.”

“You’re aware that academics were the ones who invented footnotes, right? David Foster Wallace, like, appropriated them, or something.”

“Problematic.”

“How are your classes?” Elizabeth asked.

Gem looked outright offended at this non sequitur. Arch had been really sweating trying to get these two on the same conversational plane—the night so far had really been just Arch talking to each of them separately, with the other silently waiting their turn to talk to Arch again in varying states of aggravation.

“They’re fine, you know.” Arch didn’t let Gem retreat into her mood: “How about yours, Gem?”

“They’re fine, you know.” Gem wasn’t even smirking at this point.

“Oh, well that’s good.” Elizabeth paused, then: “My own classes are going quite well; I’m in the same classes as all the usual people I know in Political Business, which will let me get a lot of networking done. The classes themselves are important, of course, but the real value of the Political Business major is in the people you meet.” Elizabeth gave a pause for effect here, as if she expected Arch and Gem to clap.

“That’s great, Elizabeth!” Arch should have known talking about networking would draw Elizabeth out of her shell. Or, they had known, but had considered it a drastic last resort. “Tell us more!” Gem rolled her eyes at “that’s great,” but her face registered plain shock and horror at “tell us more.”

“Well, in addition to a full course load, I’ve also secured an internship for credit with the current president of the federal student government; his mentorship and the experience I’ll get from this opportunity will ensure my success when I’m eligible to hold office next year,” she was picking up speed, approaching babbling pace. Arch opened their mouth to ask a question, but she continued: “Since student government is one of the metrics of leadership ability most hiring managers look for, getting elected and cultivating a good track record will be important for me in gathering qualifications for a management-level job after graduation.”

“Why do you have to worry about getting a job after graduation? Your parents can just give you one at their company, right?” Gem was too cool and collected for that casual tone to be real. Gem was rarely cool, and never collected.

Elizabeth faltered, but pushed forward: “None of the jobs at my parents’ company are ‘given,’ Gemini. We consider every candidate, no matter who applies—”

“So do you see a lot of people in tech support or social media jobs, moving to management-level jobs? If you know so much about hiring at your parents’ company, you would probably know how many people at the top jobs there started at the bottom. Right?”

“Oh hey look, the potatoes are almost two thirds of the way cooked!” Arch gestured, kind of theatrically, toward the gurgling drink dispenser.

“Probably about zero, right?” Gem continued, now gesturing at Elizabeth with the multitool like a sword of justice. “Because screen-slaves probably don’t even know how to write a cover letter for an upper management job, much less how to use your Poli-Biz-speak to interview for one! If a factory worker tried to apply for one of your parents’ jobs, they might interview them as a joke, but they would never actually stand a chance against people whose embryos were selected for implantation based on genetic aptitude for those jobs!”

Then Elizabeth did something weird: she cocked her head to the side and said, almost casually: “I may be overstepping here, but aren’t you the Outer Ring ambassador’s daughter? I’ve seen you at dinners and things.”

“You’ve seen me?”

“Er, well yes, you’re…memorable.” Elizabeth backpedaled. “And I mean, you’re here at Alexandria University, where only people whose families hold land on-planet…er, on a planet, can afford the tuition.”

“What’s your point?”

“I actually really wanted to hear more about your networking, Elizabeth,” Arch began.

“Gemini and I are having a conversation, Arch. To be quite frank, you’re being a little rude.” Elizabeth turned back to Gem: “You’re taking a position of advocacy for the lower class, but you’re not in the lower class. We’re very different personally…but in this way, we’re the same.”

The drink dispenser beeped. Arch was afraid to move, so they didn’t get up to reset it.

Elizabeth had trailed off, leaving Gem to move her mouth for a couple seconds, then say: “We’re not…the same.” she spat. “You may have seen me at dinners, but you would never talk to me, would you?!”

“Why, of course—“

“No, you wouldn’t, because I’m a scruffy Outer Ringer with no class.” Gem interrupted. “My parents are backwoods colonist rednecks, right? And our home is a place criminals go to avoid the death penalty, right?”

“Well, the criminals are your laborer class, not your fellow politicians—“

“Not only that, but I’ve seen you!” Elizabeth looked even more taken aback at this. “I’ve seen you with your Poli-Biz friends, in the halls, and in that stupid atrium that your family built to show everyone how big all your dicks are—and when I see you with those people it’s clear that you’re not nearly as popular as you think you are.”

Elizabeth’s face went still for a second, and only re-assumed its normal expression because she seemed to realize it looked weird that way. “What could you possibly know about my friends?”

“They don’t look like your friends. Not the way me and Arch are friends. Do you have anyone like Arch in your life? And don’t say Arch, because Arch is mine.”

Gem bared her teeth in a smile. Elizabeth's standard networking smile was long gone, and at this her hackles went up--Arch didn't even think she had hackles. They didn't even know what hackles were, but they did know that now Elizabeth's were definitely up.

“I don’t care about Arch! I don’t care about either of you! Neither of you are valuable social connections!” Arch guessed that was the most damning thing she could think of to say, and she certainly said it that way. Elizabeth then seemed to remember she was committing a crime, and stood, moving back over to her bed and her Economics of Government reading without another word to Arch and Gem.

“Wow, sick burn, Elizabeth.” Gem called after her, recovering her customary sarcastic drawl. Arch’s heart was pounding in their ears. Its beating was so quick and irregular it almost sounded like someone was pounding on the door of their room. Wait…

“Who the hell is that?” Gem hissed to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth, last to notice the knocking, shrugged from in front of her screen. “I don’t know; I don’t have any friends, remember?”

“Hello? Your environmental monitor is showing abnormal levels of steam coming from your drink dispenser! Open up, so we can inspect!” It was their RA. Despite the imminent danger, Arch blushed a bit at the sound of her voice; they almost accepted their circumstances if it was an excuse for her to come into their room.

“You narced on us?!” Gem furiously whispered at Elizabeth.

“No, idiot, she said it was the monitor!” Elizabeth gestured toward the drink dispenser, which had been giving off steam for some time now. The nearby monitor, instead of beeping to give them a chance to fix the situation, had immediately notified the authorities.

“Dammit dammit dammit.” Gem started walking in a circle with one hand tugging at her hair.

“Please answer! I will take further silence as evidence of incapacitation on your part!” Arch had only talked to the RA at floor meetings, and hadn’t at all anticipated how businesslike the tall, waifish psych student became under fire.

“Hm, that didn’t work.” Elizabeth mused to Gem. “Maybe if you curse three more times it’ll make her go away.”

“Shut up. You’re in this just as much as we are. You think sitting in front of that reading is going to make her think you didn’t notice all that steam?” Elizabeth blanched as Gem continued. “We have to think of what to do! Arch, what are we going to do?” Gem stopped pacing and looked at Arch.

Elizabeth stopped glaring at Gem and looked at Arch. “Yes, Arch, what are we going to do?”

Footnotes

1 Some genius in marketing thought video-windows should be called “vindows.”[return to text]

2 A common Earth greeting. [return to text]

3 Give her a break; she’s probably never seen a raw potato before.[return to text]


	11. Chatlog 12-15-3431-2030

Chatlog 12-15-3431-2030

[Arch has created the conversation “Arch, Ana, Gem”] 

[Arch has connected] 

[Arch has renamed the conversation “Ana meeting Gem conversation”] 

[Arch has renamed the conversation “Ana’s meeting Gem and it’s gonna be great!”] 

[Gem has connected] 

Gem: hey 

Gem: good job hacking us up this conversation, dude 

Arch: Hey! 

Arch: And good job on the joke where you call everything I do on my computer hacking! 

Arch: Ana’s gonna love it! 

Gem: wait, can Ana see this stuff we’re writing right now 

Arch: I think she’ll be able to once she logs on! 

Gem: k, I’ll keep that in mind 

Arch: Oh you! 

Arch: Classic Gem! 

Arch: Gem Classic™! 

Gem: everything you’ve written in here so far has had an exclamation point 

Arch: Pot kettle black, friend-o. 

Gem: ??? 

Arch: Everything you’ve written in this conversation has been all: 

Arch: oh hey 

Arch: were we caring about something 

Arch: i didn’t notice 

Arch: i was too busy being cool i guess 

Arch: k 

Gem: Gem Classic™ 

Gem: Ana needs to get used to that right away 

Gem: no easing into it 

Gem: not even just classic Gem; 

Gem: she needs Gem X-Treme® 

Gem: Flavor Blasted ∆Gems 

Arch: Delta Gems?? 

Arch: Like in calculus?? 

Gem: The rate of change in Classic Gem™ Flavor measured over seven different dimensions of Gem. 

Arch: Seventh Dimensional Flavor 

Gem: with a theoretical eighth dimension that can only be modeled in pure abstraction 

Gem: actual Flavor Data can’t be plugged into the equations 

Gem: you just get a lot of garbled irrational numbers and greek letters 

Arch: That flavor blast must have been from some kind of nuclear flavor bomb, to necessitate such complex physics :o 

Gem: Exactly. 

Arch: Oh hey, you actually used a period and capitalization! 

Arch: See, you’re more soft-hearted than you look, you emotionally distant loner! 

Arch: Maybe someday you could even use an exclamation point? 

Gem: you’ll have to kill me first 

Gem: (^—^) 

[Ana has connected] 

Arch: Brace yourselves! Friendship incoming!!! 

Ana: Hi, Arch! 

Arch: Hi! 

Ana: … 

Gem: … 

Arch: … 

Arch: Where are my manners! 

Arch: Gem, this is Ana. 

Arch: Ana, this is Gem. 

Ana: Hello. 

Gem: Hey. 

Ana: … 

Gem: … 

Arch: … 

Arch: Wow, it’s so cool to be hanging out with both of you! 

Ana: It’s certainly a thing you wanted to happen, and then arranged! 

Gem: i’m out of my mind from how cool it is 

Ana: …… 

Arch: …… 

Gem: …… 

[Arch is typing] 

[Arch is typing] 

Arch: So Gem! You and I are doing a project in our Lit and Language class on Gossip Girl, aren’t we? 

Gem: um, that we are 

Arch: Ana, you’ve got a lot to say about that show, right? 

Ana: But of course! 

Ana: It’s probably the best document we have of what it was really like to be a teenager on Earth. 

Ana: It was also one of the first dramas that made use of the internet as an instrument of social conflict! 

Ana: And the "XOXO Gossip Girl" catchphrase is still referenced to this day! 

Gem: (-.-) 

Ana: Though it’s old enough now that people may not even know they’re referencing it. 

Ana: It’s just like all the new words and phrases coined by Shakespeare that by the 21st century were commonplace. 

Gem: (-_-) 

Ana: Like, you know the joke about one fish saying “how’s the water” to another fish, and the other fish asks “what the hell is water?” Gossip Girl is the water. 

Gem: (—__—) 

Ana: And contemporary artists are the fish. Obviously. And the joke as a whole is an illustration of how contemporary art is made. 

Ana: Do you get it? 

Gem: uuuuuh that’s great and all, but I kinda didn’t want to take time off from working on this Gossip Girl project just talk about it even more on my break 

Ana: oh. 

Arch: Aaah. Yeah that’s understandable! 

Arch: Well, what do you feel like talking about? 

Ana: I still feel like talking about Gossip Girl. 

Arch: I meant Gem. 

Gem: Er, idk 

Gem: like we were just talking before 

Gem: and in general, we usually just talk 

Gem: we riff memes back and forth 

Gem: just spit flamin’ hot Meme-os at each other for hours 

Gem: (Memin’ hot flame-os) 

Gem: why can’t we just do that? 

Arch: Oh! Well, Ana, what do you think? 

Ana: You mean, just rearranging words and images into absurd structures? 

Gem: um 

Ana: A way to demonstrate the comedic possibilities of semantic form, through deliberate abandonment of coherence and aesthetic appeal? 

Gem: uuuuh 

Ana: Often utilizing the stylistic hallmarks or icons of well-known art, commercial media, or web interfacing, in a way that is humorously incongruous, often lewdly so? 

Gem: maybe you should leave the meming to me and Arch 

Ana: But I’ve even taken several classes on memes! If anything, I’m more qualified than you! 

Arch: This is going slightly off the rails. 

Ana: No, no, here, let me try! 

[[Ana has sent an image]](https://imgur.com/a/aWlsE7F)

Ana: There! What do you think? 

Gem: (@.@) 

Arch: Ana…I… 

Gem: …………………. 

Ana: … 

Ana: What? [Gem has connected] 

Ana: Was that not a valid meme? Gem: Arch can we stop 

Ana: It followed classical meme composition… Gem: I don’t like this 

Ana: In fact, Gem: I don’t like having a weird college 

Ana: I would even go so far as to disagree, Gem: student trying to theorize my memes 

Ana: Were you to contest its validity. Gem: this is too much discourse 

Ana: After all, in the early 21st century, [Arch has connected] 

Ana: memes were used to satirize, Arch: Just give her a chance! 

Ana: not just comic forms of the time, Arch: I know she doesn’t really do memes 

Ana: but the very idea that anything is funny at all. Arch: But she’s great! You’ll see! 

Ana: So your not seeing my meme’s humor, Arch: Do it for me! 

Ana: is actually a typical reaction to a meme. Gem: aaaaaaughhhhhhhh fine 

Ana: But one common to non-memers, ironically. Gem: (~_~) 

Ana: Is that what you two are saying, though? [Gem has disconnected] 

Ana: That it’s not funny? [Arch has disconnected] Ana: …….. 

Ana: Do you not like it? 

Gem: um 

Gem: Ana put down the memes and step away from them with your hands up 

Ana: ??? 

Ana: You know, your knowledge of memes might just not be at a level that would allow you to appreciate my efforts. 

Ana: I’ve taken several classes on memes! 

Gem: you can’t learn about memes from a book 

Gem: you learn them on the streets 

Gem: the internet streets 

Ana: Hmph. 

Ana: Fine. 

Ana: ……… 

Arch: ……… 

Gem: ……… 

Arch: Uh, Ana, is everything okay? 

Gem: Arch just leave it 

Arch: Ana, I thought your meme was good! 

Gem: what 

Arch: You were right, it did have all the classical elements of meme structure! 

Gem: Arch 

Gem: I can’t even 

Arch: Ana, are you okay?!?!?! 

Ana: I’m fine. 

Ana: I was just retrieving a snack from across the room. 

Arch: Ooooh okay! 

Arch: Hahaha I thought you were MAD or something!!! 

Arch: Hahaha phew!!! 

Gem: (x.x) 

Arch: Let me guess, was that snack a Victuquick™? 

Ana: Heh, that is indeed the snack. 

Gem: wait 

Arch: Eurgh, enjoy. 

Ana: Oh, I plan to enjoy! 

Gem: did you just say 

Arch: I’m gagging all the way across the internet connection! 

Ana: Hm? 

Gem: Victuquick 

Arch: Oh my god. 

Ana: Why, yes, I did. 

Gem: those are the SHIT 

Gem: I drink them all the time 

Arch: I didn’t think it would happen like this... 

Ana: Oh cool! I love Victuquick™! 

Ana: They’re great for when you can’t deal with real food! 

Gem: they’re great for when you can’t deal w/ real food 

Gem: !!! 

Gem: oh wow 

Gem: it's like we’re on the exact same mental plane 

Ana: You know, 

Ana: on earth, there was an ancient superstition that saying the same thing at the same time as another person would put a curse on them that would compel them to buy you a drink. 

Gem: um, are you flirting w/ me 

Ana: Oh, no no no, the drink you buy someone for a “jinx,” as it was called, would be a soda! 

Ana: Not alcohol, which was the drink used in the courtship ritual you’re thinking of! 

Gem: uh-huh 

Gem: fascinating 

Ana: Yes, exactly! 

Gem: …….. 

Gem: uh 

Arch: Aaaaaaanyway, we were going to watch some Parks and Recreation, right? 

Arch: Gem, you’re going to love these uncensored episodes Ana has access to! 

Gem: didn’t you guys just watch that show all the way through 

Arch: Yeah! And now we’re going to watch it again! 

Arch: With you! 

Gem: (>_>) 

Gem: idk 

Ana: Did Arch fail to mention that was the point of this? 

Arch: I couldn’t have failed to mention it… 

Arch: Could I have? 

Gem: you failed, Archiekins. 

Arch: ……….. 

Gem: shit; I don’t mean that in a bad way 

Ana: Arch, we can just watch Parks and Rec again together! 

Ana: Without Gem! 

Gem: i definitely didn’t mean that the way i know you’re taking it 

Arch: No no! It’s fine! 

Arch: Um, well, we could just all hang out some more if you two want? 

Ana: What, just talking? I suppose that’s fine. 

Ana: We shouldn’t talk about memes, though, if the two of you don’t accept my memes as valid… 

Arch: But we do! That was a totally valid meme! 

Gem: arch 

Gem: buddy 

Ana: It’s okay if you don’t like it. 

Ana: I don’t care. 

Ana: It’s fine. 

Gem: arch 

Gem: i’m just gonna go 

Gem: i’ll see you in class in like four hours 

Gem: hope you sleep before then, lol 

Arch: Probably won’t. 

Arch: Okay though!! 

Arch: See you tomorrow/ in four hours! 

[Gem has disconnected] 

Ana: So really, tell me what was wrong with that meme. 

Arch: Nothing! It was great! 

Ana: Oh? 

Arch: Gem’s got her own specific style of meming. That’s all! 

Ana: Well… 

Ana: What did you think of it? 

[Arch is typing] 

[Arch is typing] 

Arch: I thought it was an amazing meme! 

Arch: I guess I didn’t say so before because Gem seemed not to like it. 

Ana: Hmm. 

Ana: That’s a bit of a problem with you, Arch. 

Ana: You’re so busy trying to please people like Gem, who require your constant agreement and approval, that you can’t be genuine with people like me, who don’t want anything from you. 

Arch: Heh…….. 

[Arch is typing]

[end of excerpt] 


	12. Ana

Ana loved the smell of Victuquick™ in the morning. Plastic-y, with a hint of soap. She also loved the texture (soggy chalk) and taste (sugary paper), and she loved these things at all times of day and night, not just the morning.

The vending machine had a decent supply today, so fortunately Ana wouldn’t be forced to get into a bidding war with other would-be buyers over today’s available Victuquicks™.[1] Just to be sure things didn’t get ugly later, though, she bought a few extras and slipped them into her standard-issue RCC messenger bag. The Eridani corporation might not approve, but she had a sneaking suspicion that Reinhard Chopra just might.

Ana detached the outer no-spill lid and loped down the moon-base hallway, sipping her beloved Victuquick™. She frowned. Maybe love was a strong word for how she felt about Victuquick™. What she really loved was efficiency, which Victuquick™ provided her with. She had started outsourcing her nutritional needs to Victuquick™ her freshman year, in an affected gesture of scholarly detachment from the world of things. She couldn’t actually remember if she really hadn’t had time to eat before Victuquick™—but she certainly didn’t have time now.

Her fingers kept exploring the paper document she was grasping in her non-Victuquick™ hand. She couldn’t help herself; it was so tactile. On Earth, paper had been made of wood. The paper to make this document had of course been printed from pure carbon instead, so it was imitation wood. But still! Ana could feel the fake plant fibers between her fingertips. It was almost erotic. Oh, who was she kidding—it was erotic.

The best possible way to keep something private is for it not to be on the Internet, so RCC conducted its grading, and kept records of sensitive student information, in paper form.[2] RCC also fielded all inquiries and requests about grades and student information through paper forms. Ana assumed there must be a back-up of all that paper somewhere, but she didn’t know how one would back-up a piece of paper, so she was mostly just speculating.

The paper document in Ana’s hand was a request form she had filled out to have a digital copy of her transcript made. It was one of the materials she was sending in for her semesterly application to be editor-in-chief of the anthropology department’s student journal, Popular Music Stars of American Imperialism. She had been published in it most semesters during her time at RCC, but her editor-in-chief applications had always been rejected. She didn’t understand why. She could think of two main qualities one would look for in an editor-in-chief: “able to write content for the publication in question,” and “a ruthlessly logical but fair leader.” Both were qualities she had, but despite them she had never gained the position.

The school records were only accessible through in-person administrators, in an office which was incredibly conveniently located on the other side of the moon from Ana’s dorm. Ana gritted her teeth at the thought of the ride all the way to the admin cluster, but continued on her way. After all, she was here to drink Victuquick™, and gather skills and qualifications for her future career. And she was all out of Victuquick™. She reached the end of the hallway and turned, coming to the moon trolley’s airlock, where the car was just pulling in.

The staff at Popular Music Stars of American Imperialism had suggested to her she could try being a copy-editor, or even an associate editor, before trying to be editor-in-chief. They didn’t understand. Ana Kepler did nothing by half-measures. Not academics, not bubble-gum, not anything. She also didn’t have much of an interest in talking to most people unless she had power over them, meaning that until she became editor-in-chief most of her interactions with journal staff would be meaningless to her. No, she would just go on applying for the top position at the journal until she got it or she graduated. Any other course of action would be a compromise, and Ana never compromised.

There was a hissing as the trolley door found a seal with the airlock.[3] Ana stepped into a car and found a seat that wasn’t too filthy. College students ruined everything. Why would the train going to the admin cluster have vomit stains? Who was getting drunk in (or on the way to) administrative buildings?

The trolley started moving. The cars were old enough they practically creaked when they decoupled from the dorm station, but no one had died at RCC for decades. That thought made Ana feel safer, though it actually meant that the probability someone would die at RCC was increasing with every passing second. Ana strapped in and pulled out her screen; at least she could get some work done during this pointless errand.

The trolley car was plastered with ads for all the school’s corporate sponsors, and propaganda for the school sports teams. There were also the ubiquitous health PSAs about drug abuse and mental health crises. Ana found them assaulting, so she temporarily turned off her eye prostheses, plunging the train car into blur. With her eyes only half working, she could focus on her reading, without having to look at the appalling scenery.

It was just as well she couldn’t see—after all, there wouldn’t be much of a view on this ride. Ana began looking over her resume as the trolley released from its seal, and the trolley car went off like a shot into the interior of the moon. The straps bit into her as the trolley accelerated, but she tried to ignore it. She had work to do. A resume to brush up. An editor-in-chief-ship to win.

_Ana Kepler - Anthropology Scholar_

_Education, Chronologically Ordered_

_Reinhard Chopra College, Undergraduate Studies.  
Currently pursuing a degree in 21st century culture and history (the two are inextricable), writing a thesis about ____ with Professor ____ of the ____ department advising.  
3431 - 3435 (expected graduation year)_

Frowning, Ana erased the bit about her thesis. She would put her thesis into her resume when it was actually approved, by an actual advisor, who had actually been assigned to her. She also erased the commentary on culture and history, since employers who didn’t know that wouldn’t appreciate it, and employers who already knew it wouldn’t need reminding.

She also added an entry about her future master’s degree at Pluto. So:

_Ana Kepler - Anthropology Scholar_

_Education, Chronologically Ordered_

__

__

_Reinhard Chopra College, Undergraduate Studies._  
_Currently pursuing a degree in 21st century culture and history._  
_3431 - 3435 (expected graduation year). Thesis tbd._

_Pluto Military Research Base, Graduate Studies in Applied Anthropology._  
_Thesis tbd._  
_3448-3450 [planned]_

That was better. Ana continued on to her publication history. Unfortunately, her blog wasn’t considered a valid qualification at Popular Music Stars of American Imperialism—she had learned that the first time she had applied for the editor in chief job. Last night, she had spitefully reworked her publication section to list only her publications in Popular Music Stars of American Imperialism, since they couldn’t dismiss themselves as an invalid qualification.[4]

_Selected Works Published, Chronologically Ordered_

_“I’m Slippin’ Under: An Investigation Into Causes and Effects of Britney Spears’s Mental Health,2006-08.”[5] Popular Music Stars of American Imperialism, Winter 3431 Issue, Reinhard Chopra University Press, pp. 59-137._

_“No One Man Could Have Had All That Power: A Critique Of Leopold Dietrich’s Theory Of Kanye West’s Influence in Late 20th- Through Late-21st-Century Geopolitics.” Popular Music Stars of American Imperialism, Spring 3432 Issue, Reinhard Chopra University Press, pp. 75-189._

__

__

_“P-P-P-Poker Face, P-P-Poker Face: Repetition and Obfuscation in The Fame/ The Fame Monster-era LadyGaga Lyrics,”[6] Popular Music Stars of American Imperialism, Winter 3432 Issue, Reinhard Chopra University Press, pp. 42-99._

__

__

_“I Don’t Give A Damn About ‘Reputation:’ Taylor Swift’s 2017 Slump.” Popular Music Stars of American Imperialism, Spring 3432 Issue, Reinhard Chopra University Press, pp. 79-129._

__

__

_“We Abruptly Stopped: Miley Cyrus’s Cultural Appropriation Phase and Her Unsuccessful Return to Country Music.” Popular Music Stars of American Imperialism, Spring 3433 Issue, Reinhard Chopra University Press, pp. 55-135._

And so on.

Fun fact: with this kind of trolley system where vacuum is used as propulsion, every trip, no matter how far apart the two stations are, takes 45 minutes.[7] Of course, this meant that it didn’t make sense to build trolley lines between all conceivable pairs of points on the moon.[8] RCC was very cheap, after all.

It doesn’t take 45 minutes to redo a resume, but it can take 45 minutes to stare at your resume while making and unmaking minor tweaks. This is what Ana did on the trolley ride. She emerged from the trolley with the paper document and a bad mood, and the mood got worse when she realized that the paper had somehow become deformed in the places where she had been gripping it.

She realized that the natural oils secreted from her fingers must have softened the fibers of the paper, while the pressure of her fingers holding it reshaped the sheet of wood pulp into an imprint of her thumb. The whole page was buckled around the thumbprint. She desperately hoped the admin office accepted glitched paper.

The admin office was down a long hall, longer than Ana was accustomed to in space, where every inch of a habitat was expensive to build and even more so to maintain. Most dorms were built like beehives, all spiral corridors and interlocking cells, to make everything as compact as possible. Ana felt a strange sense of apprehension looking down the long straight hallway, like something awful was lurking at the end of it but, like in a dream, she couldn’t stop moving toward it.[9]

She opened the door and stepped into the main admin building, which had the same curving hallway as every other RCC building. The office was only about a 45 degree turn from where she started, and soon she was in front of a desk in a room that smelled…fibrous. It smelled the way amber looked. It smelled the way chamomile tea tasted. It smelled the way the paper document in her hand felt.

“Is this the paper records office?” Ana had been thrown off balance by the smell, so she didn’t notice the “Paper Records Office” sign right in front of her.

“Yep, you’re in the right place. Though it’s kind of a weird time.” The admin was using a screen, though he also had a big stack of paper documents next to him. Ana couldn’t help but be amazed at how carelessly the micro-thin pulp slabs were arranged; they were just stacked right on top of each other a foot high! Was that good for them?

“I’m here to access my transcript.” Ana finally said to the admin. She might have been wrong to say “access,” since she was unsure what verb she should use for getting a copy of a piece of paper. Downloading obviously wasn’t right. Maybe just, copying? But you couldn’t copy a piece of paper like you could a file. Unless RCC employed scribes to copy the documents by hand like in the Middle Ages?[10] But that would be absurd…

“You’ll have to come back during office hours.” Throughout this conversation, the admin hadn’t looked up from his screen, which was playing either the news, or a tv show about a news network.

“What do you mean? If you’re in the office, then logically this must be office hours, correct?” Ana protested.

“I’m not an admin, I’m just the overnight guard,” said the overnight guard. “I don’t have the security clearance to pull files. Try coming back during the daytime. We open at nine.”

Ana had known it was three in the morning, but she hadn’t thought that would be a problem. What kind of file could only be accessed during the day?

“Why can’t there be an administrator here during the nighttime? Do the files need to sleep or something?!” Ana sputtered. She was 99% sure that paper files did not need to sleep.

“No, but people do.” the guard smirked at his retort. Ana had to admit it was a decent riposte. “In case you didn’t know what regular office hours are, they're nine to seventeen[11] daily, except for weekends.”

“Oh what, do the files need to go to church too?!” Ana knew the bit had already been shut down, but this was a good enough add-on she felt it could make a comeback.

“Heh.” The guard apparently agreed. “Listen kid, there’s nothing I can do. You’re just going to have to live by the same rules everyone else does.”

This was the last straw. Ana felt fury percolating inside her, boiling in her stomach and being forced by the pressure up into her brain, where it turned everything bitter and acidic. Without another word to the guard, she spun around and headed back to the train. By the time she was seated, her anger was cold-brewing in her guts, ready to slowly steep for the rest of the night while she waited for “office hours” and another 90 minutes spent on the train.

She opened a reading on her screen, but something odd happened—her eyes were traveling over the words, but she kept reaching the end of the page and finding she hadn’t absorbed any of the information at all. This kind of reading-failure had never happened before. She didn’t understand what was going on. After a few tries, she turned off her screen and confusedly stared at her reflection in the trolley window.

Window-Ana looked exhausted. Train-interior-Ana hadn’t been getting very much sleep lately. Lady Sleep had always been a bit of a coquette where Ana was concerned, and things hadn’t been great for the past month or so that she hadn’t been talking to Arch. For the past week, sleep had almost eluded Ana completely. She had done a lot of laying in bed in the dark the first night or two, but after that she stopped wasting time trying and just let sleep come to her when it felt like it, waking up with cricks in her back after falling asleep in weird and non-orthopedic positions.

As she went longer without a full night of sleep, she had to work harder to stave off thoughts of her conversation with her advisor the previous week. “Ana dear, no one here actually goes to Earth!”

The conversation was a song stuck in her head. A really annoying, disturbing song, written by one's least favorite band and covered by one's second least favorite. The first verse began with Ana asking: “What? But then how do people do research?”

“We use drones, mostly. They go onto the planet controlled by researchers, who then direct them to the sites they want to explore. People haven’t had to go to Earth in person for hundreds of years!”

CHORUS:

“Ana dear, no one here actually goes to Earth!” 4x

VERSE TWO:

Ana: “I—I didn’t realize…well, is there any opportunity to go to Earth if I want to?”

Advisor: “We haven’t kept the tech running, I’m afraid. I mean, it’s really not very exciting. What, did you think you would be swinging on vines through abandoned Amazon warehouses, fighting off delivery drones programmed to protect ancient treasure? Ho-ho-ho!”

The advisor’s laugh really did phoneticize to “ho-ho-ho.” He was that kind of man.

Ana: “I…no, of course not—“

Advisor: “Perhaps you would negotiate a booby trap or two? Rolling boulders? Lava? There’s no Temple of Doom on Earth anymore, Ana, and we’re 99% sure there never was one!”

Ana (growing cold and distant): I am aware of the academic community’s opinion on that, yes.

Advisor: “And of course there would be no Nazis on Earth to race you to the Holy Grail!”

Ana: “…….”

Ana: “Obviously.”

It occurred to Ana that he must have talked to students with this misconception before, and that if he had done this with all of them he was much more sadistic than his jovial manner made him seem.

CHORUS

“Ana dear, no one here actually goes to Earth!” 4x

BRIDGE:

The bridge to the song would be a surrealist recording in the style of Britney Spears’s Oops! I Did It Again, where Ana and the advisor would overact a scene from a dramatic movie, the themes of which would be roughly the same as the song’s. Spears’s composition was only rivaled by her fearless experimentation.

CHORUS 2X

Outro:

Ana: Surely students have had this misconception before?

Advisor: Oh my no! I don’t think I’ve spoken to any student under the impression they would get to go to Earth! Ho ho ho ho… [trails off as track ends]

Ana didn’t want to visit Earth through a drone’s viewscreen. She wanted to touch it. If that couldn’t happen, why was she even—

Ana stopped the thought. Then she resisted using the idiom train of thought just because she was on a train. After all, it wasn’t even a train, it was called a trolley. Obviously. Why was everyone but her so stupid?

Ana cleared her head again, and listened to the train’s constant fwoooooooooooooooo in physical and mental silence.

She began to feel thoughts trickling back into her head almost as soon as she had cleared it. They always did that somehow. She decided to work with them instead of against them: redirecting the torrential flow toward her thesis idea for Pluto. If she went to Pluto. No. When. When. Now: her idea. She would only accept thoughts of her idea for her thesis:

The idea had come to her while she was reading about a cult that had formed in the 2040s in the American Southwest. This was one of the regions hardest hit by climate change—at the time, the whole area was shrivelling and cracking like a corpse at high noon. Notorious for its body count, over a decade the cult claimed several hundred victims with its ritual executions, which were carried out as both punishment and reward.

The basic premise of their beliefs was that climate change was caused by God, to punish humans for their carbon-emitting sins—mass-produced commodities, computers, and the progress of feminism. Ana wasn’t sure why the cult thought feminism produced carbon dioxide, but it was right there in their manifesto. This premise alone wasn’t a new one, but their idea of carbon as the site of original sin, and the tortuous rituals they developed to supposedly purge their bodies of it, were unique in recorded history as far as Ana knew.

The Sons of Ozone were often referenced in contemporary “blood and boobs” media due to their most gruesome method of excecution: sealing people in plastic bags until they ran out of oxygen, poisoned by their CO2 just as the Earth was being poisoned.

Ana knew it would be an enjoyable thesis topic. She had always loved to read accounts like this, of human behavior during the period before the exodus. In fact, that was how she had first become obsessed with the 21st century. As a young girl, she had taken her first steps away from the sleep schedule of the mundane by staying up all night reading about that wild and desperate century: the cults, the militias, the violent government crackdowns as nations desperately tried to maintain their legitimacy.

But what really got Ana hooked about “climate hysteria” wasn’t actually the mass movements, but the stories of everyday people acting alone. The ones who were so crazed with fear about their dying planet that they dug out their backyards trying to make bunkers, or tried to build rockets out of their cars—usually immolating themselves and their families—in an attempt to escape their fate. And the few (but more than you would think) who simply decided to put as many others as possible, and then themselves, out of their misery.

In studying the first wave of space colonization, people kept thinking about beginnings and endings, the Human Race entering adolescence after a 200,000 year childhood—but people didn’t think about all the individuals for whom that time, and really their entire lives before and after, were just one big scary middle. For them, life wasn’t History, a set of dominos all falling in perfect order—it was a Rube-Goldberg machine constantly pushing them down tubes and off ramps and even flinging them into the air every now and then, and all they could do was scramble to keep a bare minimum of safety and sanity despite it.

Imagine being a person on Earth as the climate disasters were escalating. How do you think you would feel when the glaciers started to break off of Antarctica, when the forests started to burn, when the atmosphere hit 400 parts per million?

The answer to that question, is you would remain calm, have faith that things would be fixed somehow, and go about your business. Maybe you would have a tech startup idea you’d be trying to get funding for, maybe you’d be trying to get your art noticed, or maybe you’d be working minimum wage 60 hours a week just to make ends meet. But whichever you did, you’d settle back into complacency after each new thing; no matter what, after every single new thing.

New question: how do you think you would react to your city’s public transit going offline permanently? Being fired from your job because your job doesn’t exist anymore, because your workplace doesn’t exist anymore, because your industry doesn’t exist anymore, due to lack of electricity or supplies, or consumers to buy your shit? Having to queue at government buildings like at a Soviet grocery store just to charge your phone enough to check on relatives in other cities? Going through withdrawal from caffeine, nicotine, and sugar, while also being dehydrated, and on top of that being stressed, stressed like you never were when you were a freelancer or a social media strategist or a grad student.

You don’t know where your next meal will come from, because FEMA might not exist tomorrow. You don’t know that the exodus ships will be built in time, you don’t know if you’ll survive until then, and you don’t know if your family will be picked as colonists or if you’ll be left stranded on Earth to burn, marooned in the most absolute and utter sense.

Your reaction to these things would be an animal terror—the kind that makes a horse scream and roll its eyes back. That was what Ana knew these stories were--it was the human race rearing up onto its hind legs and kicking.

Ana knew that fear. She had never had a reason to feel it, but she did. It clenched her jaw, it pressed her fingernails into her palms, it gouged her pimples one by one while Ana watched the scars appear all over her face.

It didn’t just make her obsessed with the 21st century—sometimes it made her feel like she was the only one who truly understood the people she was studying. She didn’t know what to do with that understanding, but there it was. The discipline of Earth-Era Anthropology had no place for the study of fear, which was shocking to Ana considering it was supposed to be the study of people, who usually acted out of fear.

Ana knew that only she could stand in the ruins of Old Earth and understand why the monuments had been built, why the cities had been burned. Someone looking at Earth’s Grand Canyon who knew nothing about rivers and erosion wouldn’t have been able to tell you how it was formed, and just so, someone looking at the ruins of Old Earth’s cities who knew nothing about fear would never be able to tell you how all of it came to be.

The train was pulling into the station. How long had she been zoned out?

Ana supposed she had kind of been thinking about her thesis just now. A bit more abstractly than was strictly productive. But fine. Ana gathered her things to go sit in her room or a common area for four hours before boarding the 08:15 trolley to the admin building. She was still satiated from her Victuquick™ before the train, so she didn’t need to hang out anywhere with food. She just needed quiet, and efficiency. The efficiency, she would supply.

She wound up curving her way around the dorm toward her own room, her most reliable source of solitude. Ana actually almost never used common spaces around the dorm, since everything she needed, plus the absence of everything she did not need, was always available here. So she was surprised to find this contradicted, when she opened the door and found her roommate there.

“Katya?” Ana exclaimed. “What are you doing here? Are you staying long?” Great. This was just perfect.

Katya looked up from her closet, where she had been rummaging among the mess that was customarily piled on the floor. “Hey Kepler. Nice to see you too. Sorry to be coming in here so late; I thought I was going to wake you up, actually.”

Katya and Ana’s demeanors around each other were fairly stiff and small-talky, which made sense—Katya was currently sleeping in her girlfriend’s bed on the other side of the dorm, and she had been ricocheting around other people’s rooms for most of their four years of college, spending no more than a few nights a semester in her and Ana’s room. Ana loved living with Katya.

Katya was in EM Studies, which meant she dressed all in black and carried on a lot of affairs. That meant she fucked a lot of people. Only Katya called it carrying on affairs. “Hey, congratulations on getting into grad school. Heard a couple Anthro kids bitching about it. Guess they’re still not over that whole flame war you had with Dietrich in the student magazine sophomore year.”

“Well, you can see who’s having the last laugh about that one.” Ana smiled grimly.

“True.” Katya smirked. EM Studies kids were especially prone to smirking. Then, more seriously: “So listen, I think I broke up with my girlfriend just now…I’m probably gonna be living here for a while.” Now Katya seemed to be looking to Ana for some kind of emotional exchange, if only of the most impersonal kind.

“What, here?” This was the last thing she needed. Someone hanging around expecting her to say “Oh, I’m so sorry.” and “Hey, how was your day?” all the time… How would she get anything done?

“Yep, in this room. Anyway…” Katya didn’t seem that surprised that Ana had no interest in the emotional exchange. “Have you seen my weed terrarium? I can’t find it, and it should have grown a bunch by now.”

“No, I don’t think so.” Ana had thrown out the moldy thing the first week of class. It was some stupid trend recently for students to grow their own weed; something to do with it being “artisanal” and “organic” or whatever. Ana could have told Katya plenty about the history of marijuana cultivation, but it would only have made her more gung ho about the idea.

“Hmmm. Okay. Well, I was going to look for it a little more, then go to bed. You cool with me turning off the lights in a little bit?”

Ana was not cool with it. “I suppose that’ll be fine.” She managed.

“Sweet.” Katya returned to her closet. Ana sat down at the foot of her bed and started flicking through her screens. She liked to use both her class screen and her personal screen simultaneously, flicking through feeds on both displays; it gave her a feeling of power and productivity.

She saw that Arch still hadn’t messaged her. Odd; earlier in the night she had seen them typing for almost an hour. She had expected something by now. She noticed some Pluto registration materials in her inbox, but she was too burnt out from the admin building incident to look through them. When Katya finished her rummaging and turned off the lights, Ana lay down as well, but as usual she did not sleep.

A week later, Ana’s quarterly rejection from Popular Music Stars of American Imperialism came in the email. She could tell what it was from the preview of the start of the email, (“Thank you for your application, but,”) and deleted it without opening it.

Footnotes

1 I know what you’re thinking: in a post-scarcity scifi world where Victuquicks™ can be 3D printed (or as they say in the 35th century, printed), why would a limited supply of Victuquicks™ be auctioned to the highest bidders when anyone can theoretically have as many as they want? Well, post-scarcity doesn’t mean post-capitalism. The Eridani corporation chooses to allow a limited amount of their product to be produced, to keep prices up! We can only hope this scarcity maintenance is suspended in the event of a space station's hydroponics failing and the crew being threatened with starvation, since that’s what Victuquicks™ were originally for. (Spoiler alert: It will not be suspended.) [return to text]

2 This may strike you as unnecessarily secure, since on Alexandria only the planetary government uses this “enscription” method of security, but remember that RCC, like most colleges (and space habitats in general), was once a military base. [return to text]

3 To put it simply, the trolley is in a big tube, mag-lev’d away from the tunnel walls so it can shoot directly from one station to the other with no friction from the tunnel itself. The tunnel is open to space, instead of being sealed and pressurized like the dorm, so the train can take advantage of the perfect Newtonian physics of the void. Once it reaches the end, it docks at the station there to let passengers on and off, before being catapulted right back. It’s like a pneumatic tube, in the sense that it is a pneumatic tube. The only energy expenditure needed to run the trolley is from the airlock mechanisms in the stations. The train only has two stations, because all it can do is be catapulted all the way to the end of the tunnel by the vacuum’s force. The tech is pretty archaic, but like a lever or a pulley, you can’t beat some inventions, and a system that let space do all the work is hard to beat.[return to text]

4 Ana’s blog, and the associated posts she’s made online, are impressively prolific, but despite her career goals she actually doesn’t have any publications to her name other than Popular Music Stars of American Imperialism, and another school journal called Carbon Age, Golden Age: A Journal Of Late-American Television Drama.[return to text]

5 This article was largely overlooked due to the featured piece in the same issue on Kanye West’s mental health patterns throughout his one hundred year transhuman music career, which posited that the pattern of West’s periods of sanity and lack thereof had effects on world events as far-reaching as the election of Donald Trump, the Arab Spring, and 9/11. Ana’s 3-year range of focus and comparatively minor subject couldn’t compete with this article’s depth and breadth, and was passed over for that academic year’s Reinhard Chopra Award For Excellence in Pop Music Scholarship. This made her so furious, she wrote a paper refuting the Kanye article’s thesis the following quarter.[return to text]

6 There is a gap in publishing between the Kanye article and this one, due to Ana’s rather turbulent spring quarter her sophomore year of college. In response to her article about Kanye West, many students in the anthropology department accused her, in class and in inches and inches of print, of trying to belittle Kanye’s legacy. The ancient symbol of treachery, the snake, was used to refer to her over social media. Ana watched a record amount of EM with Arch that semester, and while she wrote plenty of material for her blog, PMSoAI’s editors required an emotional detachment in the content they published that she wasn’t capable of that spring.[return to text]

7 Sure hope this link still works for you: http://www.math.purdue.edu/~eremenko/dvi/gravsol.pdf [return to text]

8 The trolley system doesn’t take any energy, but building the tunnels and getting the trains up and running does, so only relatively long distances get to have trolley routes. After all, it would be useless to construct a trolley tunnel for a trip that would take less than or equal to 45 minutes on the surface. Distances that would take between 45 minutes to around 90 hours on the surface don’t make much sense either, since they only gain travelers like 30 minutes. However, there are some exceptions made for trips that would go through perilous terrain, like craters or other things that would be obstacles for moon buggies on the surface. Otherwise, only trips that would take over two hours on the surface are considered for trolley lines. Ana’s trip in particular would have taken about a day’s journey on the surface.[return to text]

9 Buildings with trolley stops are generally the only ones to have these corridors, since the trolley stop needs a little bit of separation from the buildings. These are also the only buildings that have basements at RCC--it’s not like you can’t dig in space, but drilling while the debris shoots off in all directions at bullet speed is tricky to accomplish, even with robots.[return to text]

10 As is probably obvious, the Middle Ages weren't actually the middle of anything.[return to text]

11 17 means 5. Obviously.

[return to text]


	13. 02-05-3432-0303

02-05-3432-0303

Arch: So just, again, to clarify—this was a critically acclaimed drama? 

Arch: It seems like an anime. 

Arch: All the people on this show are so petty and sad… 

Ana: Don’t write off anime so swiftly, Arch. 

Ana: Yes, anime was never taken seriously in America, 

Ana: But that’s only because it was in a foreign language, and produced in a foreign country, 

Ana: which most Americans instinctively disliked and dismissed. 

Ana: Animation was also looked down upon as entertainment for children. 

Ana: As you can see, though, Mad Men is neither in Japanese, nor animated, so it’s obviously not an anime. 

Arch: Harry Crane just ran out of the Kodak pitch crying because Don’s rhetoric about the past reminded him of his relationship problems. 

Arch: And what about Pete Campbell, like, always? 

Ana: You are correct in the sense that the line between “critically-acclaimed drama” and “melodramatic soap opera” is often blurry. 

Ana: Mad Men’s principal plots, after all, revolve around the characters’ interpersonal conflicts, which play as comedic or nonsensical just as often as they can be taken seriously. 

Ana: Like in animes such as Neon Genesis Evangelion and Yuri on Ice, the plotlines in Mad Men having to do with advertising usually serve to prompt and support these character-driven dramas, 

Ana: (cf. Evangelion’s battle scenes and the ice skating in Yuri) 

Ana: while in a larger sense giving all the characters a reason to be in the same world and interacting on a regular basis. 

Arch: Kepler, we’ve talked about your monologues. 

Ana: You specifically asked! 

Arch: By the way, one could argue that Mad Men is about Big Themes, while Evangelion and Yuri are just character-driven schmaltz. 

Ana: Evangelion is about overcoming childhood trauma. 

Ana: It draws heavily from the Bible and Kabbalah in its mythology, 

Ana: and makes use of Freudian psychoanalysis in its character development. 

Ana: It makes direct reference to philosophers like Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, while more indirectly alluding to thinkers like Sartre, Hegel, and Heidegger. 

Ana: Mad Men is about a man who drinks and is sad, because he misses the past. 

Ana: Oh, and his past was sad. 

Ana: (though to be fair, you have to have a pretty high IQ to understand Neon Genesis Evangelion.) 

Arch: While you were typing that, did you see what that human garbage can Pete Campbell just did?! 

Arch: He stormed into his house and wordlessly threw his coat on the floor! 

Arch: He just dropped it, and walked out of the room, and Trudy just gave it a sad look and lit a cigarette. 

Arch: It’s like, every plotline in this show is based off the characters being total emotional shitfires. 

Arch: Their Tragic Backstory will get activated by some chance event, 

Arch: and they get all sad and stare off into the distance and stuff, 

Arch: and then they make their feelings everyone else’s problem. 

Ana: You’re not wrong. 

Ana: My point is that drama is, as drama does. 

Arch: Drama what? 

Ana: Drama is contained in the external effects of a story, 

Ana: Not in an internal “dramatic” essence that is inherent to it. 

Ana: That is to say, if an audience finds a story dramatic, it is drama. 

Ana: If a story is seen as maudlin and soap-opera-like, it is melodrama. 

Ana: I see your point of confusion; the “X is as X does” idiom hasn’t been used for hundreds of years. 

Arch: Well. I guess I learned two new things today. 

Arch: Three if you count what we just learned about Harry Crane’s marriage. 

Arch: ….. 

Arch: Oh my god. Was that a fantasy sequence?! 

Ana: Yes. Don imagines going home to his wife and engaging in typical family life and emotional intimacy with her, 

Ana: but in reality he is still alone, as sad and alienated as ever. 

Ana: (I don't see what he's so sad about. 

Ana: I also spend my whole life on work and engage in little to no emotional connection, 

Ana: And I rather enjoy it.) 

Arch: Wow. 

Arch: What an anime. 

Ana: The “it was all a dream” trope was infuriatingly common to this era. 

Ana: How many papers have I started outlining, only to find out my thesis was built on some extended daydream? 

Ana: Are we moving on to season two then? 

Ana: There are plenty of other shows we can switch to, if this one isn’t satisfying you. 

Arch: Maybe we could ask Gem if she has a show she’s been wanting to watch, 

Arch: and watch that with her? 

Arch: I feel like you and her got off on the wrong foot! 

Ana: …… 

Arch: That is, the way the last conversation was set up kept you two from hitting it off the way I think you will, given better conditions!! 

Arch: And then we can all be friends together, like in a show! 

Ana: I just don’t care about Gem. 

Arch: …….. 

[Arch is typing] 

[Arch is typing] 

I only care about you. 

[Arch has stopped typing]


	14. Elizabeth

“I think I know what to do.” Elizabeth found herself once again taking charge to make up for the incompetence of others. In front of her and about a foot down, Gem angrily fwooshed her bangs up with her breath—but at least she didn’t look like she was planning to hit Elizabeth anymore. Outer Ringers were very prone to violence. “Gem. You grew up in space, correct? Our RA has that noodly look, I’d be willing to bet she did too. You could talk to her!”

“Um, do you think everyone who grew up in space knows each other?! Also, noodly?!” Gem seemed to be continuing the verbal aggression she had been displaying during her unfounded accusations earlier.

“Er, I suppose you’re not noodly, per se…” Elizabeth had to admit, despite having grown up in space Gem was much shorter and brawnier than their RA. She was also a lot angrier. This kind of overt unpleasantness never happened at her Poli-Biz social club.

“There’s not that big a difference in people who were raised in space. All you have to do is exercise and drink a lot of bone-growing juice.”[1]

The door banged open, and their RA glided in like a human mobius strip. The absurd elongation of her delicate arms and willowy torso made her look like one of the inflatable tube people Elizabeth had seen in her Advertising Through The Ages textbook. Elizabeth gave Gem a significant look, which was avoided. Gem probably wouldn’t admit Elizabeth was right, since people from off-planet tended to want to stick together—it was a throwback to the tribal tendencies of nations on Old Earth.

“Hello, Sophomores Elizabeth and Arch!” the RA, whose name was Lucy or something, had stopped yelling at them and had gone back to the perky persona she affected for floor meetings. “Please submit to this inspection or prepare to be taken into custody!” However, she still seemed to be speaking lines from the RA manual.

Lucy inspected the outside of the drink dispenser. “Hmm, the steam seems non-deadly, for now. What were you making?”

No one answered for a moment. “Tea.” Elizabeth blurted out. Gem gave her a dirty look.

“Hot water for tea? Hm, that shouldn’t produce anything abnormal…” the RA straightened up. “Well, the tech drone will be here soon to take the machine apart and see what the problem is! Remain calm and cooperative, or face arrest!”

Elizabeth and Arch nodded. Gem, an awkward fourth wheel, stayed silent.

“So how have your classes been going?” Lucy asked, emergency script dropped for the moment.

“I’ve been accepted for an internship with a member of the federal student government—“ Elizabeth started, but she received such a glare from Gem she trailed off. How rude.

“Great! Glad to see my floor getting off to a good start this semester!” Elizabeth smiled thinly and took out her screen, glancing over at Arch and Gem significantly. She typed for a moment, then their screens bleeped quietly in unison. Lucy had begun what looked like a secondary inspection of the drink dispenser.

[Elizabeth has created the conversation “Elizabeth and Arch”]  
[Elizabeth has connected]  
[Arch has connected]  
Elizabeth: How do we get her to go away???  
[Arch has added Gem to the conversation]  
[Gem has connected]  
Arch: Hey Gem!  
Arch: We’re talking about how to get Lucy out of here!  
Gem: (x.x) [Elizabeth has created the conversation "Elizabeth and Arch"]  
Gem: glad to be in the loop i guess [Elizabeth has connected]  
Gem: i guess i get what you meant about lucy Elizabeth: Arch, I’m a little surprised you added Gem  
Gem: with her growing up in space and stuff Elizabeth: without asking me.  
Gem: that’s. one wiggly looking girl. Arch: I mean, Gem is also part of this problem.  
Gem: anyway, you guys have any ideas? Arch: And she’s part of the mashed potatoes too!  
Arch: I’ve got nothing as of yet D: ........ Elizabeth: …It’s the principle of the thing, Arch.  
Arch: I’m thinking, though! Elizabeth: It’s not a major grievance, but I can’t help  
Gem: gotcha Elizabeth: but feel that since I was the creator of the  
Gem: i’m just thinking about how i can’t think of anything Elizabeth: conversation, it wasn’t right of you to invite  
Gem: and also about how the potatoes are probably Elizabeth: other people without asking me.  
Gem: gonna be pretty mushy and gross at this point Arch: ……..  
Gem: tho we could pivot and make it into potato soup Arch: Elizabeth, can we just focus please?  
Gem: it’d be pretty thick so idk maybe it’d be more of a Elizabeth: Arch, I could tell our RA that you and Gem  
Gem: chowder-type situation Elizabeth: were cooking, and I’m sure that if I tell her  
Gem: throw some coffee cream in it Elizabeth: you roped me into it, I’ll get off much easier.  
Gem: some celery from the salad bar Elizabeth: You would do better to stay  
Gem: onion and garlic powder Elizabeth: on my good side.  
Gem: “and baby, you got a [chowder] goin’” Arch: ……..  
Gem: oh hey look, Ana’s not the only one who can totally Arch: I think Gem was right about you.  
Gem: ruin conversations with stupid quotations Elizabeth: What? Gem was right? What did she say?!  
Gem: watch out Arch you might be dating me in a hot sec [Arch has disconnected]  
Gem: …. Elizabeth: …….  
Gem: i didn’t mean that, obviously [Elizabeth has disconnected]  
Arch: Obviously!  
Arch: And not only because Ana’s conversation-ruiners are much defter than yours  
Gem: but you concede that they’re conversation-ruiners  
Arch: Under the definitions of “conversation” and “ruin” I know you’re working with, sure  
[Elizabeth has disconnected]  
Gem: ……  
Arch: ……  
Gem: lol what  
Arch: um, I think she’s going to turn us in.  
Gem: lol _what_  
Arch: yeah.  
[Arch is typing]  
[Elizabeth has deleted the conversation]  


Elizabeth hadn’t realized that if you create a chat conversation, you still get notifications even if you disconnect. Arch and Gem deserved to have their stupid conversation deleted, and to be turned in. Gem’s grinning insolence, Arch’s noncommital weakness; Elizabeth should never have allowed herself to open up to two people so entirely unsuited for her friendship. She would be glad to turn the two of them in, especially since the administration would probably allow her to switch rooms after this incident. Elizabeth had been set on keeping Arch, but after this cooking episode she didn’t want anything to do with them. 

The drone still hadn’t gotten there. For all the money her family had given this school, Elizabeth had always been appalled by the service. She knew the school could print a new robot whenever they wanted—if there weren’t enough servicer drones to handle all needs, they could literally just make more. She made a mental note to let her mother know exactly how this experience had gone at her earliest convenience—she doubted she would ever have to wait for a drone again after that. 

She glanced over at Gem. The Outer Ringer was totally oblivious. Probably making more of those crude memes in her head. Elizabeth wasn’t actually sure if memes could be done in one’s head like math, but she was ultimately sure that whatever Gem was occupied with, it was something similarly tasteless. Gem caught her eye and raised a confrontational eyebrow. Elizabeth pursed her lips and purposefully looked away. 

More furtively, she looked over at Arch. They looked…sad. 

Elizabeth looked at Arch more closely. No doubt about it; they were sad. About being turned in? With their family’s wealth, Elizabeth doubted they would face any major consequences. They probably wouldn’t even be suspended. The only outcome of the whole incident would be that Elizabeth and Arch would no longer live together. They clearly didn't like Elizabeth, so she saw no reason why they would be sad about that. 

A jolt went through Elizabeth when Arch looked up and met her eyes. Their eyes really pulled you in if you looked at them just the right way. For a moment Elizabeth forgot what information she was trying to glean from looking at Arch and just looked at them with no ulterior motive. She hadn’t really considered their appearance much before. In fact, if you had asked her to describe them, she might not even have been able to think of any real physical attributes of theirs. 

They blinked in surprise at Elizabeth’s direct gaze, eyebrows shooting up into the hair that fell across their forehead. Those eyes really were quite something. 

In a blink of both theirs and Elizabeth’s eyes, Arch had looked away—pointedly, at that. 

There was some kind of roaring going on in Elizabeth’s ears; she couldn’t hear herself think. It was like there was water boiling right next to her. 

“You didn’t turn off the drink dispenser when it started steaming?!” Lucy lost her authoritative cool for just a second. She took out some kind of extendable prod and used it to push the “off” button. The roaring noise stopped, and everyone returned to the stasis they had been in before the commotion. 

Elizabeth’s mind was still whirling trying to make sense of that interaction. This kind of ambiguity never happened at her social club. She tried to remind herself that it would only be a waste of time for her to analyze this person she had been living with for the past six weeks. In-person interactions had only taught her that they were withdrawn, unmotivated, and oddly invested in an ideal of friendship that hadn’t been reality for centuries. 

Was that it? And was that the emotion Elizabeth had been feeling when they were cooking earlier—friendship? 

Elizabeth had to admit, that cooking experience had been completely different from a networking event. The way Arch and Gem constantly insulted each other, but then laughed like it was a joke; Elizabeth hadn’t understood it at first, but she had been starting to— 

“Finally…” Lucy waved the entering tech drone over to the machine. It advanced, brandishing some kind of crowbar-like tool that Elizabeth saw it would use to pop open the drink dispenser just as Arch had done. Funny, the crowbar looked basically like a sturdier, more heavy-duty version of the multitool/ shank that Arch and Gem had used earlier. 

It was odd, now that she thought about it. When she was talking to Arch and Gem about her classes, she had spoken about herself at a length she would never do when trying to ingratiate herself with someone, for fear of taking up too much of the conversation. She remembered how quickly she had been talking, the urge that had seized her to disclose her recent activities, and plans for future activities. It had been so nice to talk to someone about her ambitions for student government without worrying about how they could use that information against her. 

That never happened at her social club. 

“Wait!” Elizabeth almost shouted. All the humans in the room looked at her. The robot didn’t react. “I just realized what the problem might be. I set the drink dispenser to boil, but I had put the drink packet in the slot for cold, not hot.” As soon as she said it, she knew no one would believe it—only a freshman would make such an obvious mistake. Then it hit her that if she was caught lying to an AU official she would be ineligible to hold student government office. 

Mercifully: “That’d do it, all right.” Lucy stopped and motioned to the drone to leave. It seemed like she actually did believe Elizabeth could make that kind of mistake. “Well, I hope this teaches you all a lesson about basic drink dispenser safety. Really basic drink dispenser safety.”[2]

“It is. It certainly is teaching me a lesson.” Elizabeth nodded like her life depended on it, because it did. Kind of. 

“Just monitor the dispenser until it stops steaming. A cleaning drone will be along to deal with the rest. Also, I need you to sign this form stating your mistake and accepting the fee for the repair drone and the cleaning drone.” Elizabeth didn't wonder why the repair drone couldn't also be a cleaning drone, because that was self-evidently impossible.[3] Lucy produced a screen with a blank form on it, which Elizabeth filled out with her information, fingers shaking. 

“So I guess you didn’t turn us in after all.” Gem remarked as soon as Lucy and the drone left the room. Elizabeth must have looked surprised at her friendly tone, because Gem gave a little snort of laughter. “Can’t believe I didn’t think of that drink packet thing. Though I guess I just didn’t think of it because I preferred being expelled over admitting to something that stupid.” 

“Even as a lie?” 

“I have a reputation to uphold.” 

“Guys, there’s a cleaning drone on the way. We have to get the potatoes out before it gets here or it’ll report us all over again.” Arch handed Gem the multitool/ shank/ mini crowbar. Gem gave Elizabeth one last look. Elizabeth couldn’t quite decipher it, but she was sure it was meant to be very rude. Though it didn’t feel rude. 

While Gem was prying open the drink dispenser, Arch came over and regarded her with those eyes. “That wasn’t in your self-interest, was it?” Elizabeth could almost see an echo of Gem in their face when they smirked; she had read once that over time people come to look like their pets. But on Arch’s face the provocative aggression of Gem’s smirk became warm, almost conspiratorial—like Elizabeth was in on a joke with them, instead of Gem making a joke at her expense. 

Elizabeth marvelled that she hadn’t given smirks almost any thought until a week ago, and now she was analyzing the finer points of smirking style. “It wasn’t against my self-interest…” she started. 

Arch’s smirk deepened, and the way their eyes crinkled at the corners stopped the half-formed argument Elizabeth had had in mind for why it might have benefitted her to act the way she had. For a moment she and Arch just looked at each other, Elizabeth desperately trying to think of something to say but failing, while Arch was seemingly content in the moment. Was she smiling back? What was her face doing? Did it look stupid? Probably. She realized her fingers hadn’t stopped trembling. 

“Hey, this is some pretty decent looking potato sludge. I’d eat it, anyway.” Both of them startled and looked at Gem, who was draining the contents of the drink dispenser into a bucket. 

“Well, let’s do it.” Arch looked back at Elizabeth, and gave her a much less smirking smile. Just a smile, really, just a normal smile. 

The three of them sat down on the floor around the bucket, and, armed with stolen dining hall spoons, shared the potato-water, which tasted about as disgusting as “potato water” sounds. It must have looked pretty silly, from an outsider’s perspective—just three college students eating wildly illegal foodstuffs out of an industrial container, and not even enjoying the taste much. Elizabeth still didn’t see the point of cooking as recreation. But after “the potato incident,” as they called it afterward, Arch began making a habit of asking Elizabeth to hang out with them and Gem, and even Gem started giving Elizabeth slightly friendlier smirks. 

Footnotes

1 Gem is referring to a sub-brand of Victuquick™ marketed as a bone density supplement for space teens. Its actual name is Osteodenz™. [return to text]

2 The equivalent on Old Earth would probably be putting plastic or tinfoil in a microwave.[return to text]

3The drone companies would make half the profits if they were selling only half the drones![return to text]


	15. Chapter 15

Chatlog 7-05-3432-2000

Ana: Arch? Are you there? 

Ana: I know you’re online. 

Ana: You just updated your watching status on the message board. 

Ana: You’re watching Toxic right now. 

Ana: Stop watching and talk to me. 

Ana: ………. 

Ana: How many times do I have to ping you before you answer? 

Ana: Is it one? 

Ana: Two? 

Ana: Three? 

Ana: Four? 

[Arch is typing] 

[Arch is typing] 

Ana: Five? 

[Arch is typing] 

Arch: Hey. 

Arch: Yeah, I’m here. 

Arch: I kind of just wanted to watch Toxic alone right now. 

Ana: I was worried about you. 

Ana: You have been…quieter than usual. 

Arch: You know me. 

Arch: Catatonically depressed Arch. 

Arch: Classic. 

Ana: You have been more classic than usual. 

Arch: What can I say, I’m a really classic individual. 

Arch: ……… 

Ana: ……… 

Ana: Speaking of classic, 

Ana: I had some ideas for shows we could watch now that we’re done with Toxic. 

Ana: Have you heard of Scandal? 

Ana: It’s about two people whose society keeps them from being together, 

Ana: logistically speaking, 

Ana: but who find ways to be together anyway. 

Arch: I’m pretty sure that’s not supposed to be your takeaway from Scandal. 

Ana: Well, I am the expert ;) 

Arch: Not on everything. 

Ana: Well, on Scandal I am objectively an expert. 

Ana: I have taken several classes on it. 

Arch: You’re a student, then, not an expert. 

Arch: An expert would be teaching the classes. 

Ana: ……… 

Ana: Are you angry at me? 

Arch: You know, you usually just demand what you want. 

Arch: You’ve been hinting at things and trying to get me to hang out all week, 

Arch: And like, randomly counting into our chat thread… 

Arch: Is there, by any chance, something you want to talk about? 

Ana: I did not want to start off with that, 

Ana: Because I was responding to your constructive criticisms about my…zeal. 

Arch: Well, I appreciate that. 

Arch: But I guess passive-aggression isn’t that far off from aggression in this case. 

Ana: I am hardly the passive one in this situation. 

Ana: I am proactively trying to talk to you, and you have been shutting me out. 

Arch: I’m not. I’ve just been subdued this week. 

Arch: And why do you think I’ve been that way? 

Ana: Now who’s being passive aggressive? 

Arch: With a response like that, it’s still you. 

Arch: But back to my question: do you even know why I’m sad? 

Ana: So you’re not angry. 

Arch: What is the problem here? 

Arch: What's the problem we’ve been talking in circles about for a month? 

Ana: You don’t want to try being together romantically. 

Ana: Long-distance isn’t enough for you. 

Arch: Ana, we’re never going to meet in real life. 

Arch: Starting something now is just going to hurt later. 

Arch: Don't you understand that? 

Ana: Of course I understand. 

Ana: I’ve known it all along, really. 

Ana: I didn’t even want to become friends with you. 

Ana: Every step of our burgeoning connection has been against my will. 

Arch: …….. 

Ana: This fact is to your credit. 

Ana: I have a very strong will. 

Arch: That’s another reason this is a bad idea. 

Arch: Gem says you’re like a robot. 

Arch: One of the robots from 2001 or Portal, that want to take over the world. 

Ana: Well. Gem is like the annoying best friend in a romantic comedy who always gives the lead terrible advice. 

Arch: I think she has a point. 

Ana: Are you implying I want to take over the world? 

Arch: No. 

Arch: See, I can never tell if you’re not understanding me on purpose. 

Arch: Like, Gem meant you’re manipulative and cold, not that you literally want to take over the world. 

Arch: You know that. 

Arch: You literally have to know that. 

Arch: Right?! 

Arch: See, I don’t know! 

Ana: Well. 

Ana: I suppose now I understand why you don’t want to date me. 

Ana: You think I'm either a sociopath who’s toying with you, 

Ana: Or someone so incapable of human empathy she doesn’t even understand hyperbole. 

Ana: There are even times when I, too, think one those things must be the truth. 

Ana: By the way, both Hal and GLaDOs are computer programs, not robots. 

Ana: Another of Gem’s points proven invalid. 

Arch: I’m not going to say there aren't times when I think you must be a sociopath or a robot. 

Arch: Especially when you use terms like “human empathy.” 

Arch: Though, it’s probably better than being classic, catatonically depressed Arch. 

Arch: Being just about anyone is better than being me. 

Arch: …I don’t know why I’m comforting you, when you just interrupted my Toxic binge by counting until I answered. 

Ana: For the same reason you comfort everyone, Arch. 

Ana: You’re a good person. 

Ana: You’re the best person I know. 

Ana: Though I only know a couple other people. 

Ana: ....... 

Ana: My point being, when I have those moments when I think I’m a sociopath or a robot, 

Ana: You make me not want to be those things. 

Arch: ....... 

Arch: Aw. 

Arch: It’s like I taught you to love. 

Ana: You did that too. 

Arch: Well, if we’re done sniping at each other, what do we do now? 

Ana: Well. 

Ana: What if we just tried being the way we’ve always been? 

Ana: But with the knowledge of each other’s mutually reciprocated feelings. 

Ana: No more talking about what we should do— 

Ana: Or conspicuously not talking about it, for that matter. 

Ana: We just…do things. 

Ana: We let whatever happens naturally, happen. 

Ana: Or does that sound like the kind of solution a robot would come up with? 

Arch: No. 

Arch: In fact, I guess muddling through hard situations knowing there’s no ending that won’t suck is kind of the most human solution. 

Ana: So should we start watching Scandal? 

Arch: ........ 

Arch: Why not.


	16. Chapter 16

Gem was sure Elizabeth had scheduled this lunch in the Eridani Atrium as a power move. There was literally a statue of Elizabeth’s mother in view of the table where they had just put down their trays. Gem considered telling Elizabeth that her mom was hot, but she would probably take the leering comment as a compliment. Also, it wasn’t true. Berenice Reagan Eridani looked like she’d privatize you as soon as look at you. 

Elizabeth was vivaciously chatting up a passing flock of Poli-Biz kids, leaving Gem alone. That was perfectly fine with Gem. Arch and Gem had been letting Elizabeth tag along more often when they cooked or watched EM, but the way Elizabeth talked constantly during movies—specifically, the way she criticized the “conversational gambits” of each character and proffered better “networking strategies” for them to use in each scene—had kept Gem from warming up to the Alexandrian any more than the potato incident had grudgingly forced her to. 

In fact, spending more time with Elizabeth had only really made her more irritating in Gem’s opinion. Gem had only even agreed to this lunch, and to Elizabeth’s continued presence as an interloper in Gem and Arch’s friendship, because of what Arch had finally told them over the near-liquid mashed potatoes. 

Gem had wanted to kick herself after she heard about the thing with Ana—she had actually sensed something was wrong a few weeks ago, but hadn’t asked Arch about it before they went off the grid. Usually Arch’s conversation was all “Ana’s writing an essay on this” and “last night Ana berated a stranger on the internet about that” ad nauseum. The total absence in the last few weeks of these frequent, annoying “Ana-cdotes,” as Gem called them in her head, while mentally finger-gunning herself, had gotten conspicuous. She had even guessed that they were close to breaking up, as she’d had reason to every now and then over the years, but they never really did, so she didn’t connect that to Arch’s little vacation from functionality. 

“I know I’ve been keeping it from you,” Arch had explained, “but it just would have made it all seem so much more real to tell you about it. For a while it was like I couldn’t even let myself think about it, you know?” The reason Gem would fling herself into the void of space for Arch was in their eyes when they apologized for things they didn’t need to apologize for. 

“She said ‘talk to me when you’ve decided.’” Arch continued, “But it seems like it’s basically….over.” Arch folded into themselves, squeezing their knees. If Elizabeth hadn’t been there to potentially make it weird, Gem would have embraced them much more fully. 

“Well Arch, it might not be bad for things to be over with you and this girl. She doesn’t seem to have your best interests at heart.” Gem had been stunned at this comment from Elizabeth, until: “Of course, no one really does have your best interests at heart but you. The key to a good match is finding someone whose own best interests align very closely with yours; you can then expect them to act roughly in your best interests most of the time.” 

“Thanks Elizabeth. I’m not really looking for that kind of match,[1] but thanks anyway.” Arch managed a smile; their unfailing kindness to even people like Elizabeth was another reason Gem would fling herself into the void of space for Arch. Though this reason was also mixed with irritation, Gem reflected, since it encouraged people like Elizabeth to keep talking, as Elizabeth was about to do: 

“I see….” Elizabeth clearly didn’t see. “Why…” she didn’t seem able to finish the question. Finally: “What’s the problem with that kind of match?”[2]

“Can we stay on topic, Elizabeth?” Gem said, imitating Elizabeth’s Talking Down To Gem voice. 

“Ah. Of course.” The Alexandrian paused. “I only meant that there are plenty of people in this ring for Arch to consider, and that they might well find a more suitable partner. This is actually especially true if they don’t necessarily need to be their partner’s legal spouse.” 

Gem didn’t like the look on Elizabeth’s face at all. Arch, on the other hand, seemed not to see anything creepy in that comment, and was looking pensive. Gem hoped Elizabeth wasn’t getting any ideas. Though of course, if Elizabeth did make some kind of gross advance on Arch, Gem would finally have a reason to deck the Alexandrian good. 

Ugh. A friendship offered in the heat of the moment after a barely-escaped arrest was bound to be cause for regret. Gem knew this. But Arch didn’t. That was what worried her. Because the third reason Gem would fling herself into the void of space for Arch was that Arch would never take back an offer of friendship once it was made. This reason was also accompanied by irritation. 

Back in the present, Gem was nibbling on her variety of sugary delights (though accelerating to snacking, with full-on lunching just over the horizon), and waiting for Elizabeth to sit down and tell her why they had to eat lunch together when they could have had lunch much more enjoyably separately. She was considering taking out the paper book she was reading,[3] just so Elizabeth’s little friends could watch her go back to a table to have lunch with someone reading a paper book. But before she could fish it out of her bag, she heard Elizabeth’s voice: 

“Well, anyway, I’ve got to be off! I’m doing some community service work with that…that…her. Over there.” Elizabeth was using her Networking Voice: chiming, affable, and sickly, sycophantically sweet. 

“Sorry about that.” Elizabeth sat, and performed a few hair-fluffing and clothing-straightening gestures to settle herself in, before noticing Gem’s rather rapidly moving silverware. “Did you start eating without me? That’s very rude.” 

“Well, dealing with it can be part of your community service.” Gem replied with her mouth full. She always ate with much more gusto when Elizabeth was around. Elizabeth’s diet required that her salads be bigger than whatever she ate for a main course, while Gem’s “fuck bitches, get money” diet, as she had named it while describing it to Elizabeth, involved getting ripped at the gym and using the credits to eat whatever she wanted. 

Gem actually didn’t understand why Elizabeth didn’t just exercise as much as she, Gem, did if she wanted to be able to eat more without gaining weight. Though she recalled that she had once witnessed Ana saying to Arch: “But if you wish you could write like me, why don’t you just do it for several hours a day until you’ve acquired the necessary skill? It’s not very hard to make the time; all one requires is dedication and conviction.” So she assumed that exercising every day wasn’t actually that easy. 

Despite kind of understanding that Elizabeth not being able to eat like her wasn’t actually in her, Elizabeth’s, control, Gem took a certain glee in Elizabeth’s covetous looks. Elizabeth actually had to stop and gather herself for a moment before beginning: “As you know, Arch has gone through a breakup recently, and has already had a fairly severe episode of depression as a result.” 

“I do know that.” If it weren’t for Arch’s reaction, Gem would have had basically no problem with the breakup. Arch’s constant chatter about Ana and efforts to get Gem to make friends with Ana were annoying, but tolerable—but Gem did have a problem with Ana being 100% in control of every part of her and Arch’s relationship, all the time. When Gem had hung out with Arch and Ana, the way Arch bent over backwards to please her had made Gem even more uncomfortable than Ana’s terrible meme. 

If Arch truly was broken up with Ana, not only would they not have someone who at any given time seemed to be either a robot or a psychopath constantly trying to get them to move 20 lightyears away from Gem, they would also be able to exercise a lot more personal freedom. It would be good for them. 

Also, coincidentally and unrelatedly to her opinion, Ana being gone meant that Gem would now get Arch all to herself, for the first time in years. 

“I’m sure you were quite happy having Arch to yourself all these years, but now that I have become closer to them, you realize that this won’t be the case anymore?” Elizabeth had a particular talent for saying things like this. Gem supposed this casual tone could be called her Ignorant of Dramatic Irony voice. 

Now it was Gem who had to pause and collect herself. “Uh, are you trying to say that you want to fight me for Arch’s friendship? Because considering my gym credits I don’t think that’s a fight you’ll win.” 

“No, Gemini. Why do you…” Elizabeth regrouped. “What I wanted to hash out over this lunch involves the fact that Arch spends time with both of us, but we,” Elizabeth gestured between the two of them (rather theatrically in Gem’s opinion), “do not like to spend time with each other. We antagonize each other whenever we’re in the same room. Yes, Gemini, I accept partial blame, because I know that social interactions take two people to perform—“ 

“Well good for you. You’ve learned so much already.” 

“The second premise upon which I have based this plan, which I shall soon relate to you, is that we both care about Arch and don’t want to see them suffer any more from their breakup than they already have. To that end, I submit that they need positive social interaction as much as possible.” Elizabeth paused for a breath. “I also submit that social interactions with us are less positive for them when they involve us fighting.” 

“Accepted.” Gem admitted. 

“Which means that it’s in Arch’s best interest to spend time with both of us, but separately. This has the added benefit that we can probably cover all of their waking hours between us.” 

“You’re saying we should block out what times we’re each going to hang out with them like some kind of friendship schedule?” 

“A friendship schedule! Precisely!” Elizabeth looked at Gem with something like respect for the first time. 

“And all the effort we would need to put in to coordinate separate hangouts with Arch is worth more to you than getting along with me.” What angle was she playing here? Did she think because she lived with Arch, she’d get the better end of this deal? She should have learned by now that living with Arch meant they interacted with you less. For all their squishy friendship rhetoric, they were even more introverted than Gem, and Gem was so introverted that some days she considered talking to the AI in her room a grievance. 

“Well, we would also need to put in a lot of effort to get along with each other, if continuing to socialize with Arch together was the plan. I think this approach is better suited to our strengths, though.” 

Gem had to hand it to her: that was a solid assessment of her and Elizabeth’s strengths. And it would be good if Arch had more supervision. Gem knew that whatever ulterior motive Elizabeth had for wanting Arch to be mentally healthy was probably at least a little bit evil, but with this new upheaval in Arch’s life Gem needed to be able to keep them safe. 

A rising tide sinks all cities. Arch being super depressed would be bad for Arch since they’d be super depressed. It’d be bad for Gem since her friend would be in trouble and she wouldn’t be doing all she could to help, and it’d be bad for Elizabeth because…Gem wasn’t quite clear on that. But whatever reason she had to want Arch to be okay, Gem would accept it for now. 

But before she could grudgingly agree, a hand was on Elizabeth’s shoulder, and she was smiling, and standing, and embracing a boy who had come up to stand behind her. He was tall, and his rakishly long hair was slicked with precision into a hairstyle Gem was sure got all the Poli-Biz girls hot and bothered. Gem herself didn’t see much in it, though of course men weren’t typically her thing. 

“Gemini, meet my fiance, Adam.” After they hugged, Elizabeth and Adam assumed a joint posture where they each had one hand on the other: Elizabeth’s on Adam’s shoulder and Adam’s on Elizabeth’s waist. They looked like strangers at a ballroom dancing class. 

Adam extended his hand. “Adam Centaurian. Nice to be connecting with you, Gemini. I hope you don’t mind if I borrow Elizabeth for a moment. Weddings take so long to plan.” 

“Years.” Elizabeth added. “We’re getting married two years after graduation!” 

“Not soon enough.” Adam purred to her. 

“Oh you!” Elizabeth seemed vaguely robotic most of the time, but this was absurd. “We would do it sooner, but you know how far in advance you have to reserve everything. Though the real reason,” she shared a knowing glance with Adam, “is that we needed to avoid a couple other event weddings happening right after graduation. After all, if we were just one more of the couples getting married in 3436, that would hardly be an auspicious start to our life together.” 

Gem was still processing. “Uh, hi, Adam. I don’t know if you remember, but we actually went to high school together.” 

Adam politely raised his eyebrows. “Oh! Wow! Um, how are you?” He didn’t remember who she was. 

“I’m good. How are you doing?” 

“Oh, great. Getting married to Elizabeth, preparing to take over for my parents at The Company in the future; everything’s great.” 

“Sounds great.” Gem hadn’t even put that much sarcasm into the comment, but it was enough to make Elizabeth swoop in to do damage control. 

“Well, that’s very nice for you two to be able to catch up. We should get that planning thing straightened out though, right, Adam? Sorry Gemini, I’ll be right back!” And with that flurry of social niceties, Elizabeth was ushering Adam away, leaving Gem alone again. 

Adam Centaurian. What a throwback. What a douche, Gem thought. So this was who Elizabeth had chosen to share her life with. In high school, Adam Centaurian had been in the analog group to Elizabeth’s friend group at AU. He wouldn’t have noticed Gem and Arch if one of them had walked up and sat in his lap—though security probably would have noticed, and nonviolently restrained them. His family was one of the only ones as powerful as Elizabeth’s—Gem supposed she should congratulate Elizabeth on the catch. Ironically, of course. 

The Eridani Atrium being located on Centaurian station was a pretty weird literalization of their union, Gem mused. She had no doubt that it was Adam’s Centaurians to whom this station owed its construction. Gem thought back to how Elizabeth and Adam acted around each other. When they talked, they hadn’t even really been responding to Gem’s reactions; it was like they had been determined to do the same things no matter what happened externally. 

Not to mention how they had acted like they had a quota of physical intimacy that was satisfied by touching each other with one (1) hand at all times. Gem hoped Elizabeth’s family wasn’t expecting some kind of bloody sheet display; these two seemed like the kind of people artificial insemination was invented for.[4] The very unwanted image of Elizabeth and Adam having sex entered her mind; it was as professional and politically correct as their conversation just now had been. 

Gem saw that Elizabeth and Adam had retreated to a nearby table to consult with each other over a screen in tablet form, which they were passing back and forth so they could both make changes to whatever frilly fancy frippery it was showing them. They were sitting, again, so impersonally that they could have been any two students working on a project together. 

Gem considered reading “My Immortal” again, but she was finding herself unaccountably angry. She couldn’t believe Elizabeth had the gall to be flirting with Arch—no matter how awkwardly—when she was engaged to someone else. 

“They might well find a more suitable partner. This is actually especially true if they don’t necessarily need to be their partner’s legal spouse.” Disgusting. 

So did Elizabeth imagine Arch could be her depressed concubine, cooking illegal food for her and servicing her sexually while Adam raised her legal children? Not on Gem’s watch. And much more effectively, not on Arch’s parents’ watch. Gem supposed this was the only time she could be glad Arch’s parents were the way they were. 

Gem squinched up her face in revulsion as a picture of Elizabeth and Arch having sex flashed through her head. Why did she always have to picture people having sex? Why did it have to be Elizabeth? The answer was that her OCD often troubled her mind with visions that were disturbing and revolting to her, which were completely outside her control and did not represent her actual thoughts. Despite knowing this, Gem went ahead and made up for the two sexual thoughts she had had about Elizabeth with several dozen angry ones, and by the time Elizabeth came back to their table Gem was more than ready: 

“So. How did you and Adam meet?” 

“Oh, you know, our parents are very close. The usual.” 

“And what is it about him that turns you on? The greased-up hair? That scraggle of pubes he thinks is a beard? His diction?” 

“That’s disgusting. We aren’t like that.” Elizabeth regarded Gem’s now empty tray with characteristic distaste, and began to pick at her own meager lunch with a studied disinterest that she probably thought was classy. 

“Then what are you two like? Because you just told me you were, like, marrying each other.” 

“Don’t be an idiot, Gemini.” It had only been during the potato incident and beyond that Gem had been able to get this much of a rise out of Elizabeth. Granted, Gem hadn’t been trying as hard before, and she definitely hadn’t known Elizabeth well enough to target her jibes effectively, but it was still gratifying to get better at a new skill. 

“So then, why not admit it? You’re in an arranged marriage. Like Catherine of Aragon, or Hillary Clinton.”[5]

“It’s not like that. Those women had to scrounge political power from men and use their husband’s name to get what they wanted. This is a marriage of equals; two great powers aligning for mutual interest.” 

“Phew, it’s getting steamy in here.” Gem tugged at her collar and feigned a grimace. “So you’re just going to marry someone you hate and ride the money train to the grave?” 

“Oh, Adam and I don’t hate each other! We’re very good friends—best friends, really, especially since we’ve been spending so much time together planning our marriage. But we’ve never really had anything, you know. Like that. Going on.” Elizabeth’s distaste was savory as always. 

“Hang on, one more thing. Don’t legal couples need to be, like, biologically complementary?” 

“Yes.” Elizabeth didn’t seem to understand. 

“Like, you two need to be able to have a biological child?” 

“Right. We can.” 

“Oh.” Gem had already felt like a dick for asking, and now she felt like a dick for being so obtuse.[6]

“I’m sure our children will be beautiful.” Elizabeth mused absently, sipping her peppermint tea. 

“So you’re going to raise children with someone you don’t love and barely even know?” 

“I know him quite well. I just said, we’re good friends. We’ve known each other since we were little. All of our friends have.” Gem had forgotten that if you were born on a planet with a bunch of other kids around, you could later know some of them from when you were a kid. “And what do you care? I don’t get the sense you’re asking all these rude questions out of concern for my happiness.” 

“Fine. Let’s get down to brass tacks. What kind of scheduling scheme did you have in mind?” 

Elizabeth pulled out her screen and arranged it so it was big enough for both of them to see it and manipulate what was on it.[7] Gem blanched just watching her touch the handle parts with food-hands. 

“First we’ll map out both our schedules.” She pulled up a blank calendar sheet. “The times when only one of us is free, will of course be allotted to that person. Then we’ll take our overlapping freetimes and divide them evenly, with allowances made if one of us has significantly less free time than the other. That is, if one of us—namely, me—spends less time being free in total, that person should be allotted more of the overlap time than the other, and generally given preference in scheduling.” 

Now Gem saw what her angle was on this. Elizabeth wanted to get into Gem and Arch’s lives and take Gem’s place, while adding sexual interest to the situation. By formalizing her and Gem’s claims on Arch’s time through this system, Elizabeth would be able to negotiate Gem out of her own best friendship. It would bring the fight onto her own turf, giving her the advantage. Gem had to hand it to her, it was a smart move. But she’d reckoned without one thing: Gem being smarter. Gem imagined taking off sunglasses while she thought that last part. 

Gem raised an eyebrow at Elizabeth and said: “What, so you think you have less free time than I do? 

Elizabeth flustered, but bounced back: “Well, I have an internship this semester, and I’ve always been very active in my social club—“ 

“Those are both things that you’re doing with your free time.” 

“Those are other commitments that take away from my free time.” Gem was surprised Elizabeth could still talk with her jaw that clenched. “If you’re in any clubs, those wouldn’t count as free time either. Though you’re so antisocial and rude I doubt any club would have you.” 

“So your social club isn’t for fun? You call those people your friends, and when I said they didn’t really like you you said I was wrong. You’ve actually been doing nothing but trying to convince me that your social club is something you do with your friends.” 

“So you’re accepting my fellow club members are my friends, just in time for that assessment to benefit you?” Gem didn’t see where Elizabeth got off calling out disingenuous rhetoric when that was literally her major. Instead of responding, she moved on to the idea that had occurred to her: 

“Well then, how about this: I spend a lot of time at the gym. Probably about as much time as you do hanging out with your friends. That means my time in the gym doesn’t count as free time, allowing me to get extra dibs on our overlap time too.” 

“Fine. Your gym time cancels out my club time. Agreed?” 

“Agreed.” 

“So we’ll divide up our overlapping hours evenly. Fine.” Elizabeth fumed. She reached for her screen and started laying out her free time on the calendar. 

“See, I’ve still got a problem with that.” Gem felt like she was in the Wolf of Wall Street or something. She had never seen the movie herself, but she gathered that it had to do with business. This conversation almost made her see why people liked Poli-Biz so much—she was really enjoying fucking Elizabeth on this deal. 

“What now?” Elizabeth had nearly finished her salad; all she had left was her lentil loaf and an apple. She was probably saving her paltry protein portion for last, but that choice wasn’t serving her well—from the taut tone of her voice, Gem could really tell that her body was under increased strain from lack of nutrients. 

“When I come over to Arch’s room for my overlap time, you know they’ll try to get you to hang out with us if you’re there. If we’re going to keep it from being awkward, you’re going to need to go somewhere else during those times.” 

Elizabeth lightly blanched. “Gemini. That would mean I would have to spend my studying time away from the room. And most of my other free time too.” 

“You might be home less.” Gem picked up the apple from Elizabeth’s tray, but before she could execute the brilliant power move of biting into it, Elizabeth snatched it back. Gem supposed Elizabeth had to take care of what food she could get. 

“I will wear headphones, and make my excuses to Arch for not joining you. I will not vacate the room, but I will not engage in any socializing with Arch.” 

“Fine. It’s a deal.” Gem spat on her hand and held it out to Elizabeth. She had read this was something pirates used to do on Old Earth. She hated touching other people’s hands, and was repulsed by her own spit, not to mention other people’s, but she was willing to be a little uncomfortable to let Elizabeth know what a rugged individualist she was. 

Elizabeth regarded Gem’s spit-covered hand. Then, to Gem’s utter surprise and disgust, Elizabeth spat on her own hand, seized Gem’s hand, and shook it firmly. 

Gem gasped. There were only a very few things worse, to Gem’s OCD’s sensibilities, than another person’s food-infused spit making contact with her hand. The only worse thing would have been Elizabeth leaning over and licking Gem’s face with her food-slathered tongue, or perhaps Elizabeth taking a bite of food, spitting it out, and shoving the partially chewed slime into Gem’s mouth. 

“You knew that would freak me out.” Elizabeth made eye contact with Gem, and didn’t break it. There were probably Poli-Biz classes on eye contact, which Elizabeth had clearly aced. “And yes, it did freak me out. But the thing is: I knew it would freak you out just as much.” Their hands were still touching. Gem could feel her own spit mingling with Elizabeth’s. Elizabeth’s eyes hadn’t left Gem’s. 

Gem was silent. Elizabeth had clearly practiced her handshake so it had the perfect measure of firmness. Gem wondered who she had practiced her handshake with. She certainly couldn’t have practiced with any of her Poli-Biz friends; that would come off as much too strange. Good god, could she have practiced with herself? Shaking her own hand? But that wasn’t really possible, the angle wasn’t right. Her spit was on Gem’s hand. Her hand was on Gem’s hand. Her HAND and SPIT— 

“Gemini?” Elizabeth was giving her a look that Gem had named the Uncomprehending of Mental Illness Symptoms look. Dammit, who was Gem kidding; she came up with these on the fly—there was no precedent to her calling that look of Elizabeth’s by that name. She hadn’t even seen that look before. Her SPIT— 

“The deal is done.” Gem croaked. She reached with her non-Elizabeth’s-spit-and-skin hand into her bag, pulling out her wipes. With a deft motion, she opened the wipes with one hand and pulled one out, scrubbing at herself furiously without caring that Elizabeth was watching. When she was done, she tossed the wipe onto her tray, and pushed the “retrieval” button with her sleeved elbow. The tray floated away. Only then did Gem look back up at Elizabeth. 

“I guess I’ll see you at the changing of the guard.” Gem perfunctorily laid out her free time on the screen, putting in more overlap time than necessary to maximize her time with Arch. She could skip class or something if needed. 

Gem was so out of sorts from the handshake that it wasn’t until she had said her abrupt goodbyes and begun walking back to her room that she realized: mathematically, her hours with Arch would not be affected by that move, since they would still each get exactly half of the overlap hours. How embarrassing. 

Footnotes

1Upper-class families basically practice feudal arranged marriages these days. The more money you have, after all, the more careful you have to be about who it passes to. Luckily, with genetic testing and birth control, members of corporate families can take all the lovers they like outside of marriage (and boy, do they), but they still need to produce at least one biological child with a legal spouse to pass on their money, and that’s what marriage is for. Meanwhile, in the lower classes, marriage is a form of social control that helps regulate the population’s demographics and limits social mobility. [return to text]

2Elizabeth has a point; you don’t even have to have physical sex with your spouse to make a baby. You just have to parent the resulting child (often separately) and make some financial and business decisions together that, as Elizabeth mentioned, are usually easy because your interests are very aligned. I mean, I guess if you let feelings make your business decisions, it might seem distasteful… [return to text]

3A paper printing of “My Immortal,” one of the first instances of Internet-based literature. Gem particularly loved how it employed spelling mistakes to both satirize and embrace 2000s Internet culture’s noted lack of regard for the period’s rules of literature and discourse, which before the Internet were enforced by gatekeepers like publishing houses and literary magazines. Just as posting a story online and writing a story about another author’s characters pushed the envelope of what literature could be, so the insistence on loose aesthetic standards and lack of formal rigor challenged 2000s readers’ ideas of what a “good” story” or a “well-developed character” was. [return to text]

4Artificial insemination was actually invented for couples on Old Earth who were in love but could not conceive, not couples who had so little sexual chemistry that they would prefer to get pregnant without physically touching each other. [return to text]

5Catherine of Aragon is famous for her book What Happened, the story of how she lost her husband Henry VIII to populist dark horse Anne Boleyn. The book even offers some insights into the related British exit from the Catholic Church, which happened around the same time. [return to text]

6While babies can be engineered using two sperm or two eggs, there’s a bit of a taboo against that in Elizabeth’s tier of society, meaning that children created that way can’t inherit money. There’s a spirited social justice campaign directed toward stopping this practice, which periodically comes up with some very clever hashtags. Almost everyone on-planet has made a post about this issue at some point or other. The Supreme Court on Alexandria will eventually in the year 3570 deliver a landmark decision declaring homo-gametous babies eligible to inherit, prompting planet-wide celebration of social progress. On an unrelated note, the average Alexandrian lives in serf-like conditions of debt, which can now be passed on to both their homo- and hetero-gametous children. [return to text]

7This is called “PC size,” or just “PC.” The term dates back to when people had Personal Computers, whose screens were around the size Elizabeth has her screen at now. Screens at a size you can hold in your hand are “phone size,” and when you stretch them so many people can see comfortably, that’s “TV size.” These terms can also be used as verbs—if your friend is showing you something on their screen and you can’t see it well, you could say “it’s too small; PC it” to tell them to enlarge it to PC size. [return to text]


	17. 11-05-3432-4000

11-05-3432-4000

Arch: You know, after watching that Black Mirror episode, I keep imagining that you’re secretly in a coma or something, 

Arch: and I just can't tell because we're hanging out in oh-so-advanced 2010s VR. 

Arch: Like this is your one chance to feel like you’re living again after decades of not being able to communicate, 

Arch: and you’re fighting a legal battle to be euthanized and live online with me forever… 

Ana: Hang on, Arch. 

Ana: Are you saying that I’m like Yorkie? 

Ana: The socially inept nerd? 

Ana: Don’t you think that’s the role you play in this relationship? 

Arch: Whatever you say. 

Ana: Aw, Arch. You’re so sweet. 

Arch: Baby, when I’m with you, heaven really is a place on earth. 

Ana: A good song. 

Ana: And a shared sentiment. 

Arch: I’ve probably listened to that song a hundred times since we watched it. 

Ana: Me too; it’s out of the ordinary, since I usually listen to music from a couple decades later. 

Ana: And you know, it’s odd—even when I’m not listening to it, I can’t stop hearing it in my head. 

Ana: It’s like my brain is…forcing me to listen to it. 

Arch: You mean it’s stuck in your head? 

Ana: stuck in my head… 

Ana: yes… 

Arch: How had you not heard that idiom before? 

Arch: I’m pretty sure they used it in the early 21st century. 

Ana: That could be. 

Ana: I must admit, I don’t know absolutely everything. 

Arch: That’s the closest to low self-esteem I’ve ever heard coming from you. 

Arch: But hey. 

Arch: Speaking of things getting stuck in one’s head. 

Ana: What? 

Arch: You know what gets stuck in my head? 

Ana: What? 

Arch: You. 

Ana: Oh? 

Arch: Like, it’s a joke! 

Arch: I’m cornily flirting with you! 

Ana: If we’re already somewhat dating, why do you need to flirt with me? 

Arch: People flirt when they’re already dating! 

Ana: I suppose they do. 

Ana: …I’ve heard. 

Arch: So you’ve never actually dated anyone else? 

Ana: Not really, no. 

Ana: But you haven’t either, right? 

Arch: I guess kind of. 

Ana: Oh. 

Ana: …… 

Ana: You hadn’t mentioned. 

Ana: Who was it? 

Arch: Well, it’s silly, 

Arch: I was really young. 

Ana: Who was it? 

Arch: Well, in like middle school to early high school, everyone starts “””dating,””” you know? 

Ana: I do not know. 

Arch: Right; homeschooled. 

Arch: Well, that happens. 

Arch: So one week freshman year, everyone’s paired off, and this friend of mine and I get the idea that we should do it too. 

Arch: It wasn’t much of anything. 

Arch: We just kissed, and did some unskilled attempts at second base. 

Arch: But it was just two kids who wanted to fit in, you know? 

Arch: Kind of like how most people get into more serious relationships in their early twenties, 

Arch: just because everyone is doing it, and they don’t want to be alone. 

Arch: Luckily, the friend and I got out of it before we could lose years of potential personal growth to a codependent relationship that we only chose because it would re-enact our childhood traumas. 

Arch: The end! 

Ana: ………. 

Arch: As you can see, it’s not really anything to write home about. 

Arch: And wouldn’t you know it, I didn’t write home about it. 

Ana: Arch. 

Arch: My parents might have decided to homeschool me too, if they found out. 

Ana: Arch! 

Ana: Was this Gem?! 

Arch: Uh. 

Arch: Yeah. 

Arch: I guess I should have figured you would realize that, 

Arch: considering Gem is my only friend, and I mention that she’s my only friend all the time. 

Ana: Why didn’t you tell me it was her from the beginning? 

Arch: I guess it just didn’t seem relevant! 

Ana: You would only have felt you had to lie, if you felt there was something to hide. 

Ana: So what is there between you and Gem that you wanted to hide? 

Arch: Literally nothing! 

Ana: What about the “Prom” ritual that happens during senior year of high school? 

Ana: You and Gem are going together. 

Ana: As friends! 

Ana: I knew I didn’t like her. 

Ana: Those faces she makes in her messages. 

Ana: They’re unseemly. 

Arch: This was one week, three years ago. 

Ana: That you didn’t want me to know about. 

Arch: Because I knew you’d get like this! 

Ana: Like what? 

Arch: I think you don’t want me to be close to anyone else. 

Arch: Like, in any way, not just romantically. 

Ana: As in, I want you all to myself? 

Arch: Yes. 

Arch: …… 

Arch: It’s especially weird that you’re this jealous when you consider that we’re not actually dating. 

Ana: No indeed; we’ve just been flirting with each other and calling each other “baby” and comparing each other to characters who are dating on tv shows. 

Arch: But we aren't, you know, official. 

Ana: Well who didn't want us to be official? 

Arch: Me! Because I know it won't work out! 

Ana: As long as we are psychoanayzing each other, I think you don’t want it to work out. 

Ana: You’re making this into a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Arch: No, I told you all the reasons why I think this won’t work out. 

Arch: You just didn’t listen, because you never listen! 

Ana: I do nothing but listen to you! 

Ana: Always talking about Gem, 

Ana: trying to get me to make friends with Gem, 

Ana: I listen to that, Arch, and I hear. 

Arch: You hear what you want to hear. 

Arch: I have no idea why that’s what you want to hear, but there you go. 

Ana: Maybe you think I’m not listening, because you’re not seeing. 

Arch: Cheesy. 

Arch: You two are closer than we could ever be. 

Ana: We can never even engage in unskilled attempts at second base, because we’ll never meet up in person. 

Ana: You’ve gotten farther with your best friend than you have with your girlfriend. 

Ana: What do you think that says about us?! 

Arch: You are not my girlfriend. 

Ana: Clearly. 

Arch: I care about you, Ana. 

Arch: And my life literally has no meaning other than the people I care about. 

Arch: You and Gem are the reason I exist. 

Arch: The reason I don’t stop existing. 

Arch: Do you understand? 

Ana: …….. 

Ana: I think so. 

Arch: You are quite literally my life, Ana. 

Arch: Are you really this jealous, 

Arch: Just because there’s one other person who I care about too? 

Ana: I simply have been getting the impression that you care about her in the same way. 

Ana: In a romantic way. 

Arch: I don’t. I just told you. 

Ana: Then why didn’t you tell me your first girlfriend was Gem? 

Arch: I guess I knew you get jealous like this, and didn’t want you to. 

Arch: And because I don’t like having conversations like this! 

Ana: Well, sometimes conversations like this need to happen, Arch. 

Ana: You can’t just table a discussion just because you consider it to be over. 

Arch: I’m not trying to! 

Ana: If we’re going to be together you can’t hide things from me. 

Arch: I’m not hiding things! 

Arch: I just didn’t want to make you upset. 

Ana: Sometimes people need to be upset, Arch! 

Arch: I don’t feel like this was a fight that needed to be had! 

Arch: It’s a non-issue! 

Ana: Well, who is not listening now? 

Ana: I just told you I think it is an issue. 

Arch: Because you’re not listening! 

Ana: How about we make a compromise. 

Ana: I will accept your claim that you are not dating Gem, 

Ana: If you promise never to hide something like that from me again, 

Ana: and re-state your claim that you are not dating Gem one more time, in considerably stronger terms. 

Arch: And then you’ll believe I’m not dating Gem? 

Ana: Yes. 

Arch: Okay. 

Arch: I promise not to hide things from you anymore, even if they would make you upset. 

Arch: I promise you that I am not, nor have I ever been, romantically involved with Gem. 

Arch: Our relationship in high school was basically ironic, our friendship has been nothing but platonic ever since, and we will never be anything more than platonic. 

Arch: Does that satisfy you? 

Ana: Yes! 

Ana: Thank you, Arch. 

Ana: I’m glad you’re doing the work on yourself to get better at communication. 

Arch: ……… 

Arch: No problem. 

Ana: Do you want to watch the rest of Black MIrror? 

Arch: Not really. 

Ana: Okay, good. 

Ana: I would have if you wanted to, but it is frankly a terrible show. 

Arch: We can definitely agree on that… 

[end of excerpt] 


	18. Gem

The weeks were flying by at AU, and not just because the system of satellites that made up the university was literally flying in orbit over Alexandria, going around the whole planet every three hours. It seemed that one moment there were three misfits sitting on a dorm room floor eating contraband mashed potatoes, and the next moment there were midterms next week, leaving Arch and Elizabeth to hole up in their room studying. 

Gem, on the other hand, ended up spending the time after she wrote each of her papers in an hour[1] critiquing Arch's papers--a dubiously helpful process that was mostly facetious comments, academic trolling, and lewd puns. This was a mid-term tradition, though Arch had to work to not think about the other half of that tradition—soliciting Ana’s expertise to refute Gem’s crackpot claims. Arch considered bringing Elizabeth in for this purpose, but she could probably only offer stilted propaganda; nothing with Ana’s academic rigor. If Arch missed nothing else, they missed that rigor.

Elizabeth didn't even hear Gem's trolling, much less engage with it--she was basically glued to her computer most of the time. That is, when she wasn’t sitting on the end of Arch’s bed, chattering about her day. Every now and then she would stop and ask Arch a series of intrusive questions, watching them like a hawk as they answered or demurred—before going right back to talking about herself. Maybe that was Poli-Biz etiquette. Either way, there hadn't been more than a couple seconds of interaction between Gem and Elizabeth in which another mashed potato incident could have come together. 

After much thought, Arch had had to entertain the idea that Gem, as an unstoppable force of provocation, and Elizabeth, as an immovable object of pomposity, might never be a good combination. Though some kind of change had taken place, now that they thought about it: Gem hadn’t been going out of her way to make Elizabeth uncomfortable the way she usually did—when Gem came over to find Elizabeth on her screen, she walked straight past. And it was even odder, because whenever Gem came over, Elizabeth was guaranteed to be on her screen, rather than sniping at Gem's attempts to get a rise out of her.

Then Arch realized something: the two of them wanted to talk to each other, but they were just shy. It was just like when Gem met Ana! Though that hadn’t really panned out—but only because things happened to get off on the wrong foot. And perhaps, as Arch was beginning to realize, because Ana could be difficult at times. (Though it wasn’t like Gem and Elizabeth weren’t both difficult. It occurred to Arch that they themselves were the only non-difficult person they knew.)

Arch had never ended up sending that message to Ana, by the way. After Gem, Elizabeth, and Arch had finished eating the potato swill, they had stayed up late talking together, and when Arch got back to their screen after everything they reread it, then deleted it. Then the weeks, as has been mentioned, began to fly by—one moment Arch was contemplating sending that message, and the next it was almost Halloween.

Now that Arch hadn’t heard a good historical rant from Ana in a long time, they didn’t have much of an outlet for their intellectual curiosity. A series of thought-tangents about Halloween and the history of space colonization led them to do some meandering research online, and eventually they found themselves in the middle of the kind of academic rambling that had…well, that had made them fall in love with Ana in the first place. It was like they were doing the scholarship they had admired her for doing. Me doing things, Arch thought to themselves, who would have thought? 

The Halloween essay probably wasn’t Popular Music Stars of American Imperialism material, but Ana might have known a publication that would be interested in it. If Arch was ever going to talk to Ana again. Which they…might? Maybe? Who knew. 

Anyway: After the Irish immigrated to the US in droves at the turn of the 19th century, they brought with them not one but two holidays that would become major mainstays of the US calendar, and from there the world's, the solar system's, the galaxy's. The first was St. Patrick’s Day, and the second was Halloween. Did that make up for the potato famine? Arch wondered. 

Whether or not it did, Halloween and St. Patrick's Day became two of the most debauched days of the year for American imperial citizens. Drugs, sex, and sugar consumption that would make AU students come in their pants were the defining features of these un-holy days.[2]

A century later, versions of Halloween were prevalent on almost all colony ships, and continued on the planets those ships were bound for. After all, while drunken revelry isn’t very compatible with the precariously pristine environment of a space habitat, ways to keep large populations docile are crucial. That meant holidays and spectacles were necessary, especially if they also helped keep up some semblance of normalcy among people who had just left almost everything from Earth behind. 

Most of these space versions of Halloween put a spin on the trick-or-treat idea by allowing people more generous sugar rations, and occasionally some sugar would be mixed with a little yeast and allowed to ferment until it became alcohol.[3] While the “treat” alcohol increased the possibility of “tricks” in the short term, it heavily reduced the possibility of more long-term, dangerous tricks—as in, space-mutiny type tricks.

For most AU kids, midterms bled into finals quickly enough that Halloween was their only breath of fresh air (usually complemented by something more sedative and neurotoxic). The actual end of the semester didn’t see many parties, since most people rushed right home for Colonization Day right after their last final.[4] After two years of poking around AU’s admin networks, Arch knew for a fact that absolutely anyone onboard with contraband of any kind could be easily caught, which meant that anyone drinking or doing drugs at AU was doing so with the implicit permission of the university. Of course, the children of the rich are always allowed to get in more trouble, but there was a bit more to it than that, Arch reasoned:

Despite the advances in space habitation, the void was not a place humans had evolved to live in. By the time a semester at AU ended, you could feel yourself beginning to squish in all kinds of ways, metaphorical and not. Your sleep schedule began losing its integrity, your appetite dropped to match your lower calorie burn, all the usual space symptoms catalogued by doctors and melancholic poets. But the thing no one really talked about was a certain restlessness, a kind of hunger, something that settlers in more human-appropriate circumstances than these had called cabin fever, madness at sea, or just plain homesickness. 

What Arch was saying in their essay, then, was that keeping the inhabitants of space docile was important whether they were .01% kids at a luxury space-college, or malnourished colonists with no guarantee their life-support functions would still be running the next day. Rich or poor, people in space go a little crazy. The few who don’t are either serial killers or Ender’s Game style heroes, though if Arch remembered correctly the heroes in Ender’s Game were serial killers, so.

“ARCH.” Gem’s voice cut through their thoughts. Arch startled, and checked the time on their screen. Wow, how long had they been typing out notes about keeping populations docile in space? Their essay was going from “Fun Facts About Halloween That Will Surprise You” to “How Your Favorite Holiday Is Actually A Government Conspiracy—You Won’t Believe Sub-Thesis #4!” Though they were pretty sure the listicle genre, a style of epic poetry from the 2100s, wasn’t a good format for an academic paper. 

“AAAARCH. You're just staring into space. Are you disassociating again?” Arch stirred themselves from their only-kind-of-disassociated train of thought. When they saw Gem’s outfit, at first they thought she had decided to take a really lazy day, while also wearing period costume, but then they remembered—Elizabeth’s party was tonight.

It wasn’t Elizabeth’s party, exactly, though she had been doing enough planning for it that it might as well have been hers. It also might as well have been an extra class she was studying for, with the amount of work and stress she had put into it. She had vented to Arch the other day about how she had just checked in with the committee putting together the party playlist, and found out that someone had put an artist from Pollux on there: 

“Don’t tell Gemini, of course, but the music from her system just isn’t appropriate for a nice party. You know what I mean, right Arch?” She had then given Arch such a conspiratorial look that they involuntarily backed away from her a step or two. “I suppose not. I see.” Elizabeth had given two remarkably fake coughs, and quickly segued back into more neutral territory. Arch once again wondered what kind of networking she got done with that kind of guilelessness—and realized that soon they would find out. 

At first Arch hadn’t really wanted to leave their room to go to the party, but then they remembered they had heard somewhere that college is a time for parties—for impairing oneself with substances and making bad choices under the influence of those substances with one’s friends, which for Arch now included Elizabeth. And apparently, for Elizabeth, now included Arch. The little family that had taken root over a bucket of potato water was now blossoming into a group that did legit friend things like going out on Halloween together. For the first Halloween in years, Arch put time and effort into a costume.

Unfortunately, this line of thinking on Arch’s part was cut short when it became clear why Elizabeth had really invited them.

“Oh dear! I had forgotten the party was only for couples! All of us have been engaged to each other since we were children, you know. I didn’t think of it. It's more of a formality, but a it's very strict formality. Ah well! I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.” Again, Arch had to wonder how in hell Elizabeth managed to scheme or connive anything in her Poli-Biz friend group when her lying was this obvious. Though, it dawned on them, the rules of politeness still prevented Arch and Gem from calling Elizabeth out on her lie directly—it didn’t matter how badly she had sold it. Was that the secret?!

Finally Gem broke the tense silence: “Well, neither of us actually wanted to go, so that’s pretty much whatever. We’ll have more fun doing what we do every year: getting under the covers and watching scary movies like Saw and Home Alone.” She seemed to have intended that as a de-escalation of the conversation, but it had the opposite effect.

“Well,” Elizabeth said through pursed lips, “No one else actually wanted you to go either. Considering you seem to have been wearing that shirt for the past week, you probably wouldn’t have passed the dress code, anyway.”

“Two weeks.” Gem smirked.

“On Pollux that sort of resourcefulness is probably considered a virtue.” Elizabeth muttered.

“You know what, Arch…” Gem was suddenly on her feet, which was never a good sign. Despite all their differences, Gem and Elizabeth had one thing in common: when one of them was about to really explode at the other, they both had a habit of standing up for effect. It was a melodramatic touch that was wearing pretty thin where Arch was concerned. They stifled an eyeroll as Gem, vibrating slightly with emotion, said: “I have an idea. Why don’t we go as each other’s dates?” 

This brought a flush of anger to Elizabeth’s cheeks, though Arch didn’t know if she was reacting to Gem’s proposition or to the standing-up thing. “Gemini, you can’t just pretend to be dating Arch. This costume party is not for make-believe nonsense.” When she was really angry, Elizabeth usually forced her voice to remain quiet and collected, but it only ever had the effect of making anyone hearing her imagine the scream she was tamping down inside her. 

Gem was smirking, and Arch knew that she was imagining Elizabeth screaming too. “We won’t be pretending. We will be dating. For that night, at least.” 

“Do you think that’s really in the spirit of things?” Elizabeth must really not have wanted Arch and Gem at the party. The idea of them dating, and thus having a way to get into the party, was clearly making her furious.

“Actually, it sounds perfectly in-spirit. All your people are only dating so you can get into the party—it’s just that “the party” where most of you are concerned is the Cool Kid Group™ of rich people on Alexandria.” When Gem intended a ™ symbol to be in her speech, you could hear it there somehow without her even saying it.

“That’s a ridiculous way to think of it.” 

“Your way of thinking is ridiculous too.” Gem jumped up and did a flourishing sweep of a bow to Arch. “May I have this dance?”

“Charmed, I’m sure.” 

Gem began to waltz Arch around the room, getting a bit closer to them than Arch would have expected her to. She finished by dipping them, with a flourish and without breaking eye contact with Elizabeth. Gem certainly seemed to determined to make Elizabeth mad, by making sure she and Arch went to the party. And Elizabeth certainly did seem mad, about Gem and Arch going to the party.

“I don’t know why I took a break from my studying.” Elizabeth tried to sell this sub-par quip by lacing it with as much venom as she could muster, but as usual it was pretty obvious she had nothing on Gem where quips were concerned. She pointedly put her headphones back on and returned to her work, leaving Gem and Arch to wait until the night of the party for her to speak another word to either of them.

Halloween was one of the most lucrative holidays of the Alexandrian year, so of course the Poli-Biz kids were all about it. However, the kind of Halloween costume a Poli-Biz kid would come up with is no sort of Halloween costume at all, meaning their Halloween parties were often more of a “business costuming through the ages” museum exhibit than a real masquerade affair. Elizabeth was dressing as a 1980s shoulder-padded power businesswoman, while Adam, who Arch had mainly heard about from Gem before tonight, was a 1960’s era Mad Men type. Arch hadn’t paid much attention to Adam in high school, but he didn’t seem at all like the giant douche Gem had described. His smile was as warm and assertive as his handshake, and he somehow looked sophisticated taking a drag off his e-cig, which was printed to look like a Lucky Strike.

Arch had capitulated to the theme by wearing a BMW executive’s bounty-hunter gear. Out of all their business costuming options, it was the most in keeping with what little aesthetic they had, which they liked to keep within the range of “pirate” to “pirate hunter.” This costume was on the latter end of that spectrum. They tried to forget about Ana’s father, who had a storied career at BMW as a gentleman privateer, but it was hard since they had made a mechanical arm just like his for their costume.

Gem had showed up in a hoodie, sweats, and flip flops, and was admonished by Elizabeth to go change until she explained that she was a Silicon Valley robber baron. “My costume is the scariest,” she declared. “Watch out, or I’ll turn your salaried position into freelance work you don’t have the right skills for anymore!” she wiggled her fingers spookily.[5]

Elizabeth huffed, but took Adam’s arm and led him out of the room. Gem comically extended her elbow to Arch, and they marched out after them. Arch noticed Elizabeth shooting an annoyed glance back at the two of them—probably still steamed about their workaround on the whole “date” thing. Elizabeth was a stickler for the rules.

As per most coming-of-age movies they had seen, Arch was planning to self-medicate pretty vigorously tonight. Gem, who was incongruously straightedge, looked sideways at the flask they stole a sip of as they left, but said nothing. She tried not to be a helicopter-mom-friend, and Arch appreciated that. They also appreciated the burn of the liquor—it tasted like a razor blade. It was also pretty incongruous for Arch's character that they enjoyed drinking liquor straight—but a character was what they played for their parents, and their parents weren’t here. 

Before they got on the shuttle to the rented space station where the party was going on,[6] they had to be patted down and scanned[7] by drones, though that was a much more comfortable experience than when Gem and Arch had to sit across a shuttle from Adam and Elizabeth for half an hour on the way across the void to the party. They made inept small talk, and watched the astrophysical ballroom dance of the satellites orbiting Alexandria, whose nighttime side shimmered below like a disco ball.

Adam seemed to assume Arch and Gem really were a couple, and kept asking questions like “How did you meet?” that made Elizabeth look like she wanted to beat someone to death with her 1980s shoulderpads. Gem, of course, picked this up and ran with it: “I’ll never forget when I walked in on my first day of school on a new planet, and there you were in the back of my literature class.” she waxed nostalgic. “We had just started dating when our Halloween formal came up, so this is almost like our anniversary, isn’t it, Arch?”

The part about the formal was actually true. Arch noticed Elizabeth’s reaction, and remembered Ana’s reaction when she found out, a lifetime ago. Arch also dimly remembered that Adam himself had spent that first-quarter formal doing shenanigans that would make Elizabeth even more peeved than she already was. It took them a moment to snap out of their tipsy flashback and answer Gem: “It was magical.”

“So you’ve been together for almost six years.” Elizabeth couldn’t hide a sneer in her voice. Adam’s smile seemed to flicker and he gave her a sidelong glance, but otherwise his manner didn’t change.

“Basically, yes.” Gem pointedly tightened her arm around Arch’s shoulder and stared Elizabeth down for a few moments of silence. Arch couldn’t believe how committed Gem was to this joke. 

“Adorable. Can’t believe I was at the same school as this love story and didn’t notice.” Now that Adam actually had a reason to treat them like they existed, Arch was beginning to think he was a pretty okay guy. Sure, he probably didn’t mean any of those polite little courtesies, but at least he could sell them better than Elizabeth. Arch felt like most people tried to make their pleasantries seem just sincere enough to not get called out for it—but then there were some people who really wanted you to feel like they meant it, and the fact that they were going to that amount of trouble meant as much as if they genuinely meant it.

Arch didn’t know if their thoughts were making any sense anymore; the contents of their flask were almost gone. Also, some illogical, naive portion of Arch’s brain really was convinced by Adam’s warm smile that he was genuinely interested in what they had to say. They found themself kind of grinning at Adam like Adam wasn't engaged to Elizabeth, and like they weren't dating Gem. Elizabeth let out a pointed sigh of relief as the sssssh of the airlock seal signalled they could exit.

\-- 

Highly formal cultures tend to have boring parties. How many times has this happened to you—you’re trying to have fun at a dance, but then your flower arrangement slips and you’re sending a completely different coded message than you meant to—how embarassing! That is to say, everyone at the party was using the same patterns of conversation they had been rehashing since they first learned to talk, but trying to make it sound like original thoughts they had just had. In a highly formal culture, high school really does never end, since high school is an archetypical highly formal culture. 

Thumping music and flashing blue lights made the place look like a nightclub, but people were using the space like a networking event. The whole place looked like it had been designed by someone who had an idea of what fun looked like in EM, but ultimately only liked to partake of fun in small, safe doses while multitasking so the time spent on fun wasn’t totally unproductive. It was like the person who designed this place had had such a malformed childhood that to her fun was just one more aesthetic she could throw on for fashion or politics. 

“Isn’t it glorious?” Elizabeth asked Arch, beaming with pride.

“It’s something.” Arch managed. Good god, the playlist sounded like it was even the same music as from high school. If someone had wanted to create a room in which to optimally psychologically torture Arch and Gem, this would have been a great way to break down their mental defenses by subjecting them to stimuli that would dredge up early emotional wounds. 

“I believe it’s the custom to offer to get a lady some punch.” Adam seemed to be both offering punch to Elizabeth, and prompting Arch to do the same to Gem. 

“Er, want some punch, Gem?”

“I guess.” Gem said, before realizing that now Adam and Arch were going to go off alone and leave her with Elizabeth.

Leaving their dates to either talk or not (but which would be more awkward?), Adam and Arch plunged into the crowd. People kept stopping Adam to shake his hand or slap him on the back, nodding politely to Arch when they saw Arch was with Adam. In the thick of the crowd, Adam put a protectively masculine arm around Arch’s shoulder to keep them together, and Arch could see what Elizabeth saw in him. Even if you weren’t especially attracted to him, you couldn’t help but notice that Adam walked through the world with a certainty that it was all for him—and when you were with him, it was all for you as well, however vicariously. 

They reached the throng around the refreshment table and stopped to wait for an opening. “So, Arch.” Adam turned to Arch, and gave them a slap on the back of their very own. Again, Arch appreciated Adam’s the effort at sincerity Adam was clearly making, even while knowing it was an effort at being sincere rather than sincerity itself. “I never see you around the Poli-Biz circles. Have you given any thought to your professional future? I know Elizabeth would be thrilled to have her roommate involved in her networking.”

Arch, knowing exactly how thrilled Elizabeth would be, said: “I guess I’m just focusing on school right now?” 

“Well, what’s school for, if not what comes after?” Adam was much better at this than Elizabeth. “I believe that we who come from good business families have a certain duty to the planet to participate in government, and guide its future."

“You have a point. But I’m really not planning to go into business.” Arch said, firmly but politely (they hoped). 

“Elizabeth told me as much.” Adam grinned. “Thought I’d make my case. After all, you know as well as I do that there are a lot of, well, less fit people around these days, waiting for their chance at a hostile takeover of whatever they can get their dirty little hands on.” Arch had no idea what he was talking about. “If people like us leave any slack, they’ll be right there to pick it up.” He jerked his head back toward Elizabeth and Gem. Arch looked that way and saw that Gem had ditched Elizabeth somehow. 

“Oh.” Adam seemed confused. “I thought your Outer Ringer friend would still be there when I did that.”

“You were talking about Outer Ringers?” Arch asked. Like most times they went to parties, experimented with drugs, or socialized in any way, they were confused and mildly afraid.

“I mean, of course.” Now Adam looked confused. “You know.” He paused. "You do know?"

Arch continued to look at him uncomprehendingly.

Adam gave a near-imperceptible snort of frustration, and took on a tone that all at once made him sound a lot more like Elizabeth: "Well, you know, Outer Ringers who have gotten a little money in the colonies.” He jerked his head in the same direction as before even though Gem wasn’t there, “They want to come set up shop in our prime Alexandrian markets instead of their own backwater economies. I can recommend a couple reputable news sources if you don't...watch the news at the moment.”

“Gem is my best friend.” Arch said, with cold disdain (they hoped). “And all the other Outer Ringers I’ve met have been pretty cool too.”

“Of course. They're lovely people. When did I say they weren't? I would never say that." From Adam’s face, it could have been Arch who had been making prejudiced comments. "They’re simply an economic threat. 'Mind on my money, and money on my mind,' as it says in the Constitution. Or 'stay out of my territory,' if you'd like a literary quote instead. What I'm saying is that invasive species must be squashed, or we end up with markets crashing from things like those rogue nanobot beetles that are eating our lithium right out of the mines. Quite the metaphor, hm?"

“Uh, sure.” Arch said, to end the conversation more than anything else. Adam was different when he wasn't politely pretending to hang on your every word. Adam saw an opening that would get them right next to the punch bowl and the two of them took it, with Arch hoping the punch would be worth the wait, and worth the sudden right turn into nativist propaganda.

They filled up the little punch cups, which were made of crystalline glass, and pyramidal in shape for some reason—they wondered if they should bother asking Elizabeth why. They didn’t start up the conversation again. As Arch fumbled with holding one pyramidal cup and filling another (since they ended in a point, they couldn’t be put down on the table), a Poli-Biz kid with blonde hair slicked similarly to Adam’s came up to face them across the punch bowl.

“Adam! A word?” Arch actually remembered this guy from high school. His whole family was named after space probes; naming conventions like that were the kind of cultivated thing Alexandrian nobles were known for, but Arch thought that one was a little much. 

“Nice to connect with you at this event, Voyager! This is my friend Arch.” Even though Arch had just found out that Adam was kind of a Nazi, it was still hard not to feel his charm when he introduced them as his friend. 

“Yes, yes, nice to connect with you at this event too.” Voyager said hastily. He definitely didn’t look like someone who went voyaging. A perilous voyage to him would probably involve a trip into an upper-middle-class neighborhood. “I need to talk to you. It’s about the vote next week. Bea is suddenly digging in her heels about some technicality and she’s bringing all the Proximist-adjacent factions with her, as always. I think we’re going to lose the bloc of kids from the western plains too, and you know they’re—“

“Crucial.” Adam finished for him. “Classic Bea. You’re right, this definitely can’t wait until tomorrow. Your place or mine?”

“You’re always welcome at mine, work-wife.” Voyager smirked. 

“Don’t let Elizabeth hear you calling me that.” Adam smirked back.

“Not one for sharing, is she?” Voyager’s tone of voice pushed just past joke territory, and Adam glanced at Arch, then gave them a glib grin:

“Well Arch, you’re her roommate—does Elizabeth like to share?” Adam’s tone was pitch perfect, but it didn’t reach his eyes. Arch, less confused than before but wishing they were more confused, gave a noncommittal shrug.

Voyager looked Arch up and down. “Right. Anyway. Back to business. Can you get away right now to do damage control on this?”

“That I can. Let me just tell Elizabeth; I’ll meet you at your place.” As this conversation was happening, Adam had deftly filled the pyramidal punch cups as if he had been doing it since infancy. Somehow holding two cups in one hand, he gestured to Arch that it was time to make their way back across the room.

Arch turned and started to wend their way through the crowd, but before they had gone very far from the punch table, Adam grabbed Arch’s shoulder and held them still for a moment. “Listen, I’m sorry for how I spoke about your friend.”

“Okay.” said Arch noncommittally. 

“And Voyager--he loves to joke, and sometimes he’s an idiot. He's engaged to another of my and Elizabeth's friends, you know.”

“Well that's great for all of you.” Arch had no desire to get involved in Poli-Biz drama, no matter how much they would have loved to screw Adam over for Gem’s sake.[8]

Adam shrugged. “Well, all right then. And Arch…I know I might not have sold it very well, but please do consider doing your part to help guide the planetary government. It’s your birthright, not to mention your responsibility.”

“I’ll think about it.” said Arch, just to get him to shut up, and tugged themselves away from Adam’s grip. Adam flashed Arch that smile again, the one that made you feel like he genuinely cared what you had to say, and walked on ahead. Arch, off-balance, trailed a few steps behind.

Arch and Adam were halfway through the crowd when Arch felt their screen buzz. Probably Gem wondering where they’d got to. She had probably pretended to go to the bathroom and was waiting there until they got back.

They pulled their screen out and froze. The message was from Ana. 

Ana: Hi.  
Ana: Are you there?  
Ana: I have to talk to you.  
Ana: I miss you.  
Ana: ……..  
Ana: I need you.  
Ana: ……..  
Ana: Please answer.  


Suddenly the room was much louder. The music from their high school years was even shittier. They kept making their way through the crowd, but it felt like some horrible dream about being suffocated in corpses. I have to talk to you. What was that supposed to mean? And what about please answer? 

It seemed like they had run through the whole message in their mind a dozen times when they reached Elizabeth. Adam was breaking the news to her, and she didn’t seem jazzed. Gem was a little off to the side, unabashedly evesdropping. Adam left, and Elizabeth’s expression once he turned his back confirmed it—definitely not jazzed. Elizabeth and Gem looked at each other in Adam's absence, then their gazes each skittered away from the other until they came to rest on Arch, standing mutely in front of them.

Arch looked at Elizabeth and Gem. Something about mental breakdowns made Arch feel like telling everyone they knew how much they, everyone, meant to them, Arch. The contrast between the two girls made Arch’s heart swell with appreciation. Gem’s wannabe-but-lowkey-actually-is rebel persona; Elizabeth’s fragile decorum and borderline-hysterical energy. They wanted to remark that they, Elizabeth and Gem, reminded them, Arch, of Jim and Dwight on the Office. 

But then they remembered Ana, who had shown them the Office when Arch had commented on the mockumentary style of Parks and Rec. The feeling of having swallowed a meteor (burning in the throat, metal heaviness in the stomach) that had prompted their thoughts came back with a vengeance. Now Arch wanted nothing more than to tell Gem and Elizabeth about the message, to ask them what they should do, to stay up all night with them composing a reply and knowing they, Gem and Elizabeth, were there to support them, Arch, no matter how the conversation with Ana went. 

Somehow, though, what actually happened was that Arch said: “I think I need to go home.” Gem and Elizabeth had each opened their mouth to speak; now they each flicked an eye toward the other in silence. Arch continued: “But you two stay and have fun. Wouldn’t want to ruin your night.”

“Arch, are you okay?” Gem moved toward them with her Mom Friend face on. 

“I’m fine. I just need to…not be here. Anymore.” Arch could barely form sentences, but Gem always understood. She nodded, and they suspected she was choked up but didn’t want them to know. Arch tried to make more words come out, but none would. They just nodded at Gem, then at Elizabeth, gave them two thumbs up, and walked away. 

They were the only one at the airlock when the shuttle arrived. A crowd of people got off. “You don’t belong here,” said their faces as they looked Arch up and down. For once in a lifetime of receiving such looks, Arch agreed. They stepped into the now empty shuttle, and didn’t fully relax until the airlock had hissed and the shuttle had pulled out into the void. 

They felt an itch to respond to Ana’s message. It was like how Gem had described OCD—Arch couldn’t think of anything else; it was like even buckling their seatbelt was lower priority than answering Ana’s message. They clasped their hands around their knees to keep themself from reaching for their screen, and experimented with sinking their nails into their palms, which Gem had admitted sometimes worked to ward off particularly nasty intrusive thoughts. 

It was easier not to message her considering they couldn't think of a single coherent reply. If they grabbed their screen right now and started typing, words might come out, but who knew which ones? Arch didn’t trust themselves to write something when they didn’t know what to say, though they also wouldn’t have trusted themselves if they had a burning desire to say something specific. There was also the fact that Ana would be watching to see if they started typing… 

As they imagined Ana hawklike in front of her screen waiting for them to start their reply, they watched their dorm emerge from space—and finally cracked, grabbing their screen and reading over the message one more time. 

Ana: Hi.  
Ana: Are you there?  
Ana: I have to talk to you.  
Ana: I miss you.  
Ana: ……..  
Ana: I need you.  
Ana: ……..  
Ana: Please answer.  


They could feel sparks of adrenaline dancing along their arms and legs, a relic of ancestors who got frightened of things they could physically fight. Lucky them.

However, the urge to reply instantly was gone. They didn’t type anything, not just to keep Ana from seeing them, but also because they didn’t know if they ever wanted to answer at all. Their sigh was lost in the hissing of the airlock opening.

\-- 

Their room was so quiet without Elizabeth. And without Gem, for that matter. With their weird pattern of free times, the room hadn’t been without one of them for a long time. Arch didn’t even bother to take off their costume before getting in bed, though they did remove their fake robo-arm. They assumed their usual huddling postion in their blankets, and reread Ana’s message, just as they had sat here for days rereading their last conversation only a couple months ago. 

Ana: Hi.  
Ana: Are you there?  
Ana: I have to talk to you.  
Ana: I miss you.  
Ana: ……..  
Ana: I need you.  
Ana: ……..  
Ana: Please answer.  


So much had happened since Arch and Ana last spoke. Their breakdown, the mashed potatoes, the Poli-Biz party, which felt like it had taken a whole week of the time they’d been apart. It almost felt like the last two months had been longer than the past three years of Arch and Ana’s relationship. Arch didn’t begin to type, and didn’t reread the message, but somehow without them doing anything the clock suddenly read 3:00, and they realized they had been sitting there for hours. 

They had just gotten settled back into their stupor when the door banged open. Gem was still in her costume from the party, looking like she had seen a ghost. She had lost her douchey sunglasses somehow since they had last seen her, but much more surprisingly, she seemed to have lost her cool. 

“Arch.” Gem was breathing hard, which with her level of physical fitness meant that she hadn’t just been running, but sprinting, and for some time. That, or she was just having a panic attack. 

“Gem? What’s wrong?” The banging of the door had snapped Arch out of their catatonia. They put their screen down and moved to sit on the edge of their bed as Gem sat down next to them. Her hands were shaking, though she was just one of those people whose hands were always a little shaky. Arch thought they looked shakier than usual, though.

“Oh, you know.” Gem said breezily (she probably hoped). “Poli-Biz parties, all those people acting like they’re reading lines off cue cards; it’s disturbing as hell.” Gem was still gulping air; Arch figured they’d better let her catch her breath. They sat for a moment, the only sounds Gem’s rapid panting and the constant hum from inside the walls. 

After a minute, Gem’s breathing had slowed, but her eyes were still wild. Still panting slightly, and without looking at them, she whispered: “I hate this planet.” There was a surprising lack of irony in her voice.

“What? Are you okay? What's--"

Gem kissed them then, taking their face in her hands, pulling them closer to her. For a moment, they were still, and let Gem kiss them out of sheer surprise, but after a moment they took Gem’s hands from around their face and drew back from her. Again, only silence, breath, machinery humming.

“Gem?”

“Eeeeyep.” Whatever had been possessing Gem was gone, and in its place was a slowly dawning mortification.

“I don’t think of you that way.” Arch imagined this was already clear, but figured they should just state it for the record.

“Yes. I know.” Gem tried to grin, and finger-gunned them weakly. “Yes. I’m sorry. I’m an idiot.” She rose, and started moving toward the door. She kept the finger-guns up.

“No, don’t go; we, uh, we can talk about this?” Arch got up too.

“Nooooooonono. Listen, can we just not ever talk about this again? Let’s do that. Good plan. All right. Bye.” Without waiting for an answer, she ran out the door. It slammed behind her.

Arch stayed where they were on the edge of the bed. Tomorrow they would need to do damage control on that so the rest of the semester wouldn’t be weird. For now, they would respect Gem’s space. 

They couldn’t believe Gem had kissed them without knowing if their mouth was clean or not. It was a sign of how consumed by her passions she had been. They hadn’t felt anything during the kiss, but the shock had definitely snapped them out of their stupor. They paced around the room, thinking, for a minute or two. Then they sat down, grabbed their screen, opened their chat with Ana, and began to type.

Footnotes

1 When she was feeling generous, Gem explained that since papers are based on thinking, not memorized information, and since she spent many hours each day thinking incredibly deep and A-grade thoughts, she actually was studying, all the time, just in a much different way than other people had to. [return to text]

2 There used to be holidays where people specifically didn't gorge themselves on food and alcohol. The term actually comes from the phrase "holy day," meaning a day spent in prayer and reflection, not bestial consumption. Thankfully, this is largely forgotten in the present day. [return to text]

3 While alcohol is pretty widely consumed in most space environments nowadays, the de-hydration it causes was a problem for early generation ships. While there was some room for error, these ships had very specific and relatively precarious feedback loops of water going around their life support systems in a cycle. If one person dehyrdated themselves completely and needed to be re-hydrated quickly, that would use up more of the current supply of clean water than the system had accounted for, meaning that until the water they had peed out with their garbage chute hooch filtered through the system again there would be less water for everyone else. Again, one person doing this wouldn't be a huge issue, but the thing about people is they tend to get drunk together. (Or at least, this is what I've been told.) On a holiday, a majority of a ship getting drunk would completely unbalance the water system on the ship, and since it's very easy to die in space the leadership usually did not tempt fate in this way. [return to text]

4 The first of the end-of-year holidays, Colonization Day, commemorated the landing of the first colony seed-ships on-planet. While Alexandria is considerably bigger than Earth and therefore has a much longer orbital year, much of humanity is still synced to Earth years for trade and communication reasons. No one's timekeeping would make any sense if there were like five different yearlong calendars to account for. And yes, that means the planet's seasons are in no way related to anything Alexandrians do. And it helps that terraforming has made much of the place feel like Southern California all year round. [return to text]

5 There’s an old series of fables about Silicon Valley robber barons. The stories follow the same structure every time: first, a consumer is frustrated at some complicated or time-consuming everyday task. A mysterious man in flip flops appears to them, usually says something along the lines of “there’s an app for that,” and presents them with a program for their screen that will supposedly make their woes disappear. However, as in the monkey’s paw tales of Old Earth, the gift would somehow turn on the consumers who used it. An app to help people find dates would give you all the potential partners you wanted but no meaningful connection; stuff like that. [return to text]

6 AU has rooms students can rent for parties, but school rules apply. Since space is a militarized zone, it's considered smart to do your debauchery on territory you control. When you're a .01 percenter that's almost more true, because you can then de-activate everyone's cameras, hire the guards who will be enforcing Space Law, and other pretty important methods of control. [return to text]

7 The scanning is the effective part, but the pat-downs have ceremonial value. They get a deeper psychological message across through fear and forced discomfort. [return to text]

8 The social model for romance during this era may be non-monogamous hyper-capitalism, but people still get mad when their fiancee has been fucking his best friend for months without telling them about it. [return to text]


	19. 01-05-3433-2133

01-05-3433-2133

Arch: But what part of it being your mother that’s Jewish, makes you Jewish? 

Ana: It just does! 

Ana: My mother is a Jew; she can actually trace her lineage all the way back to Old Earth. 

Ana: That makes me Jewish. 

Ana: And then my father is a German BMW executive, with all the engrossing backstory that entails… 

Arch: Can he trace his lineage back to when BMW was a car company? 

Arch: Or can he trace his lineage back to a spaceship?! 

Ana: No. 

Ana: But he does have a mechanical arm, if that counts. 

Ana: His biological one was blown off in single combat. 

Arch: Whoa. 

Ana: But anyway, that’s why/ how I’m Jewish. 

Arch: Huh. …what if the parent that bears you is a trans man, and the “sperm parent,” if you will, is a cis man? 

Arch: If neither of them is your mother, are you still Jewish? 

Ana: Now that I’m thinking about it, 

Ana: I believe the rule comes from the fact that the “womb parent,” if you will, is the parent who can actually prove they are the child’s parent without genetic testing, 

Ana: which was not yet available in the deserts of Earth’s Middle East at the time when the Torah was being written. 

Ana: After all, if a child literally comes out of you, it’s clearly yours. 

Ana: But the other part of the equation is more ambiguous. 

Ana: So that would mean the womb parent is indeed the bearer of Jewishness, regardless of gender. 

Arch: …. 

Arch: So, if the womb-parent is not Jewish and the sperm parent is, the baby would not be Jewish? 

Ana: Many expectant womb-parents convert for this reason. 

Arch: That’s not the point?? 

Arch: What if an artificial womb is used? 

Arch: Does the parent who gives the egg still count as the “womb” parent? 

Arch: Also, what if the parents both produce sperm, or both produce eggs? If they adopt a baby, which one, if either, would have to be Jewish for the baby to be Jewish? 

Arch: And what about those two-sperm and two-egg babies? 

Ana: Um, at that point it might just be up to the parents. And perhaps the child would have some say ;) 

Ana: But then again, I am not a rabbi. 

Arch: _Clearly._

Ana: “heh,” as you would say. 

Ana: And of what descent is your family, if I might ask? 

Arch: Uh, let’s not talk about my family. 

Arch: They’re kind of the worst. 

Ana: …….ethnically? 

Arch: No, I just mean I don’t have a good relationship with my parents. 

Arch: I don’t like to talk about them. 

Arch: Even ethnically. 

Ana: Hmmm. 

Ana: I could speculate, I suppose, but I’ve barely seen your face. 

Arch: You’re not missing much. 

Arch: Most people get their gender presentation down during puberty, 

Arch: But I haven’t even managed to nail down a gender, much less...presentation. 

Ana: I mean, you don’t have to be “presenting” yourself to me. 

Ana: You could just send me a picture of you in a fairly natural state. 

Arch: That would be a paradox, because my natural state is not having pictures taken of me. 

Ana: Ah, I see. 

Ana: Fortunately, I remember the gist of things. 

Ana: I suppose I could check out your social media to see the rest. 

Ana: If I used such forums. 

Ana: And if I could find you on there. 

Arch: Isn’t this a social media? 

Arch: Medium? 

Ana: I mean the professional networks. 

Ana: The ones that aren’t about soap operas for teens. 

Arch: Ooooh. 

Arch: I don’t use those very much, 

Arch: but yeah, there are definitely some pictures of me on there. 

Arch: Mostly taken by my parents’ PR staff. 

Ana: So they would presumably be fairly flattering? 

Arch: They’re pretty shopped, but sure, I guess they flatter. 

Arch: And yeah, you might not be able to find me on there. 

Arch: Everyone in my family has unlisted profiles. 

Arch: But you just said you didn’t use “such forums,” so why do you care? 

Ana: Well, we only know each other on this…medium. 

Ana: That is irregular. 

Ana: That is, it is irregular for people who are kind of dating. 

Arch: Are you saying you want to be Facebook official? 

Ana: How romantic. 

Ana: But no. 

Ana: I mainly just want to see you more. 

Ana: While the cost of interstellar video chat is hardly an obstacle to me, 

Ana: You are often asleep or in class, meaning I cannot call you. 

Ana: During such times, it would be nice to be able to look at your face at will. 

Arch: My social media profiles aren’t exactly like a video chat with me. 

Arch: It’s not really “me” at all. 

Ana: No one’s social media is really them. 

Arch: But mine is even less me. 

Arch: My parents’ people run it all. 

Arch: They even make my hourly transparency posts for me. 

Arch: I mean, I wouldn’t be able to get it together to make them myself… 

Ana: Do they take control of your devices remotely or something? 

Arch: Listen, I kind of already said I don't want to talk about this. 

Ana: Ironic, that your transparency posts are so markedly untransparent. 

Ana: It was already my understanding that Alexandrian morality was all for show, 

Ana: But the extent of the show is amusing. 

Ana: What about your parents, though? 

Ana: How do they keep track of you for their own purposes? 

Ana: Don’t they worry that without chaperoning yourself, you’ll ruin their reputation? 

Arch: I mean, chaperoning is all for other people’s families. 

Arch: It’s just so the ladies your mom lunches with will want to betrothe you to their kids. 

Ana: Fascinating. 

Ana: And presumably if your parents can access all your social media accounts, 

Ana: And take pictures from your screen to make those posts, 

Ana: They can probably track your every move too. 

Arch: But so, moving on-- 

Ana: Arch…do you think they know about me? 

Arch: Oh my god. 

Ana: If they haven’t talked to you about me, then either they don’t know, or they’re okay with it. 

Ana: Or they don’t want to let you know to what extent they can surveil you. 

Ana: Though considering the amount of control they have over you, I don’t know why they wouldn’t reveal their capabilities. 

Ana: After all, what would you do if you knew they were watching? 

Ana: Though perhaps, like most things on Alexandria, them pretending not to be surveilling you is for show. 

Arch: Ana. 

Ana: I know you don’t like to talk about your parents, 

Ana: But have you considered situations like this make it...necessary? 

Ana: I am not a therapy app, but I think you’re avoiding the problem. 

Arch: Avoiding? To avoid it, I’d have to know how to fix it. 

Arch: There's nothing I can do. What's there to avoid? 

Ana: Don’t you hate being so constrained? 

Ana: It’s like you live in one of those neighborhoods where you have to pay by the minute to sit on a bench, 

Ana: or it retracts back into the ground. 

Arch: Have you actually been to one of those neighborhoods? 

Ana: Do I seem like the kind of person who allows my seating space to be revoked? 

Arch: I thought you might have gone slumming. 

Arch: You know, for science. 

Arch: Soft science. 

Ana: Anthropology is a perfectly valid school of magic. 

Arch: We’ve talked about the obscure references, Kepler. 

Ana: Right. 

Ana: And we need to stay on topic: 

Arch: Oh no. 

Ana: As long as I’ve known you, you’ve never had any preferences about your direction in life. 

Ana: But have you ever considered that the reason you don’t have any preferences is because your parents have always ground you under their heel too thoroughly for you to develop any? 

Arch: It’s like you’re doing one of your usual monologues about history, 

Arch: But instead it’s about your opinions on my life. 

Ana: Well, it seems like you have opinions on your life, too. 

Ana: If you didn’t dislike your life, you would probably be perfectly fine with talking about it. 

Ana: You know you should be standing up to your parents, but you don’t want to take the risk! 

Arch: I take it you’re totally financially independent, 

Arch: And you have the mental health to hold down a decent job? 

Ana: I understand these concerns. 

Ana: But nonetheless! 

Ana: I’m dependent on my parents for money as well, 

Ana: But if they tried to keep me from doing what I wanted with my life, 

Ana: …well, I could emotionally manipulate them so they would keep giving me money. 

Ana: Don’t you know how to do that? 

Ana: Developing a set of defensive weapons against your parents’ bullshit is like, Rich Person 101. 

Arch: Well, by standard psych theories, everyone’s personality is a defensive weapon against their parents’ bullshit. 

Arch: So I guess this personality is my weapon. 

Ana: Curling up in a ball like a spike-mouse from Old Earth? 

Ana: Letting other people make all your choices?! 

Arch: You don’t let a thing go, Kepler… 

Arch: Okay. 

Arch: The few times I remember acting out or resisting when I was a kid, it…didn’t go well. 

Arch: I remember being taken to a doctor. 

Arch: But they didn’t really follow through. 

Ana: Were they going to put you on medication or something? 

Ana: Have you ever considered they might have you secretly on medication? 

Ana: There are plenty of drugs they could give you to make you more docile. 

Arch: No, like, 

Arch: Did you ever hear about this experimental treatment here on Alexandria? 

Arch: It was in the news a lot when we were in, like, high school. 

Arch: I think it might have only been a thing in the Middle Ring, since you guys seem saner. 

Arch: You know, it involves dying, technically? 

Ana: Oh. 

Arch: Yeah. They were going to do that to me. 

Arch: Who knows how that would have worked out. 

Ana: Do they still do that on your planet? 

Arch: They keep it reeeeeally quiet. 

Arch: Under Alexandrian law no one technically dies during the procedure, so it’s not hard. 

Ana: Well, doesn’t that alone show you what you need to do? 

Ana: If they’re willing to do that to you, you need to get out of there! 

Arch: Well, now that I’m over 18, they can’t do it without my consent. 

Ana: Can you even guarantee they couldn’t make you consent? 

Arch: …….. 

Arch: It seems like they’ve given up on the idea. 

Ana: Well, are you going to just wait for them to find another terrible thing to do to you? 

Arch: They have plenty of other terrible things they could do to me. 

Ana: That proves my point. 

Arch: What even is your point?! 

Arch: It seems like you’re just berating me about something I can’t change. 

Ana: That is my point! You can change it! 

Ana: We could be together, Arch. 

Ana: Not like this, for real. 

Ana: All you have to do is make some decisions! 

Ana: We could meet up at some star system between our two planets and…I don’t know… 

Arch: Live in a farm habitat? 

Arch: Raise space chickens? 

Ana: Maybe. 

Ana: I can look up habitats between the Inner Ring and the Middle Ring right now. 

Ana: My cousin spent her wild years on some hippie commune habitat out there. 

Ana: Now she runs my family’s private prisons, so I guess she left her politics in space. 

Arch: What’s there to do out there? 

Ana: It would probably be right up your alley, actually. 

Ana: The habitat she was on was a weird hippie farm where they raised real animals. 

Arch: Did they eat the animals?! 

Ana: I know they got milk and eggs from them. 

Ana: Like, out of their bodies. 

Arch: So they drank milk that actually came out of a nipple?! 

Arch: And ate eggs that came out of cloacas?! 

Ana: We can find another one to go to, obviously. 

Ana: But you’re into those kinds of countercultural ideas, right? 

Arch: Not that kind. 

Ana: Noted. 

Ana: Hmm. 

Ana: Well, here’s one that’s precisely equidistant between us. 

Ana: Tau Ceti. 

Arch: Tau Ceti. 

Ana: I’m sending you all the information. 

Arch: …….. 

Arch: Hm, it says it’s a military base. 

Ana: But civilians can work on the farm. 

Ana: Their tech does most things; we wouldn’t have to work more than a few hours a week. 

Arch: And then what busywork do we have to do for the rest of the sixty hour work week? 

Ana: Nothing! 

Ana: It’s all fully automated! Luxurious, no? 

Ana: Without a monetary system, they don’t need busywork to prop up people’s wages. 

Arch: Gee whiz. 

Ana: Apparently the whole thing was started by a chartered spaceship’s crew. 

Ana: They hacked the tech that printed their food and everything else, 

Ana: And cut themselves off from interstellar internet after they got the code for all the bare essentials. 

Arch: You found all that out in the past five seconds? 

Ana: Research is my bread and butter, Arch. 

Arch: Ana, I don’t like to sound paranoid, 

Arch: But you tend to make people paranoid. 

Arch: Have you already looked at this place? 

Ana: ….. 

Ana: I think I’ve come across it before. 

Arch: You realize this is one of those things we’ve talked about? 

Arch: Trust? Transparency? Your Dark Triad scores? 

Ana: Well, I just brought it up...strategically. 

Ana: [Ana is typing] 

Arch: If I didn’t already know this was your version of romance, I’d be offended. 

Ana: But still. What do you think? 

Arch: Are you saying you could get your academic career off the ground from there? 

Ana: I can write from anywhere, after all. 

Arch: What about all the interpersonal politics I’ve been hearing about from Popular Music Whatever of Whatever? 

Ana: The Popular Music Stars of American Imperialism set would probably be glad to talk to me at such a remove. 

Ana: Though after I graduate I will hardly be soliciting them again. 

Arch: What are you going to do after you graduate, exactly? 

Ana: Graduate school. 

Ana: I haven't really looked since I haven't even started undergrad yet, 

Ana: But I assume only Inner Ring schools would have suitable programs. 

Arch: So you do grad school, and then you move to Tau Ceti? 

Arch: With me? 

Ana: Yes! 

Ana: So what do you think? 

Arch: We would do this in like, five years? 

Ana: More like ten. 

Ana: Four years of undergrad, 

Ana: A masters, and a PhD. 

Arch: I guess that’s a long enough time period that I can commit to a life-changing decision right now without thinking about it more. 

Ana: I’m so glad you see it that way! 

Arch: No, Ana, that was sarcasm. 

Arch: But it is true that I don’t have anything booked for ten years from now. 

Ana: Is that an acceptance? 

Arch: [Arch is typing] 

Arch: [Arch is typing] 

Arch: [Arch is typing] 

Arch: Yeah. Sure. 

Arch: I reserve the right to change my mind, though. 

Ana: Yes, yes, of course. 

Ana: I’m so happy, Arch! 

Ana: I never wanted to go back to my parents’ place on India. 

Ana: Or, god forbid, go the professorial route. 

Ana: Professors are basically unpaid interns. 

Arch: Right, because you need to make money. 

Ana: You know what I mean. 

Ana: Anyway! 

Ana: Happy! 

Ana: So very happy! 

Arch: I can tell! 

Arch: That’s the most exclamation points I’ve ever seen you use. 

Arch: You’re practically like Gem that way. 

Ana: Don’t talk about her; this is our special moment! 

Arch: Oh, right. 

Arch: Gem… 

Arch: Maybe she can come with us! 

Ana: ……….


	20. Chapter 20

The Pluto compound didn’t look much different from Reinhard Chopra College at first glance. It was a big rock, with a bunch of habitats scattered on its surface. In the sky, Ana could see circling satellites that provided the base with its shitty interstellar internet service. Stellar panels stretched for miles dotting and criss-crossing the planet, like how crops on Earth’s surface had coexisted with highways and towns. 

On the feed Ana was looking at, the stellar panels[1] were just big blown-out rectangles of white, basically invisible from the glare of Sol. It looked like the planet was emitting light, instead of sucking it up for fuel. But she wasn’t really concerned with the infrastructure of the planet at large—she directed the camera drone downward, closer to the surface, and pointed it toward the main campus, where she would be spending, if all went well, the rest of her life. 

The school buildings were brutalist, utilitarian; par for the course on a mid-21st century base. After all, back then it was hard enough to heat, light, pressurize, and oxygenate the most essential spaces in a base--extra frills were not an option. That meant high ceilings, dramatic entryways, and most of the other aesthetic luxuries Earth architects took for granted were out. As technology advanced that started to change, and now even free-floating satellites were able to have ostentatious add-ons like atriums and fake Greek columns.[2]

Pluto, the least-loved runt of Sol System, was still as Spartan as it had been over a thousand years ago. Less impressively, it looked the same as it had almost two years ago, when Ana had first discovered the Pluto base's feed--and the Pluto base itself. 

Despite her iron will, Ana Kepler's body was noodly in an almost literal sense. She was long, floppy, and usually chock-full of carbohydrates. Ana was not even an al dente noodle, and due to calcium deficiency she was almost as brittle in some places as an uncooked one. In other words, she knew a life in the Dead Center's hypermilitarized zone would be a challenge for her. But once she knew, she deleted all the other grad school applications from her screen. 

She mentioned Pluto to Arch, but said it would be like winning the lottery to get in; no threat to their Tau Ceti plan. What she didn't tell Arch was that she knew her intellect could win any lottery. She would figure out things with Arch later, she told herself. Then later came, and things spiraled rapidly out of her control. Like those spiral noodles... Liberace? Mussolini?[3]

Still on the Pluto-cam, Ana panned over the campus buildings with little interest. After all, she had been compulsively studying the Pluto base via this feed for weeks. She knew which buildings were used for military training and which for classes, the quickest way to get from the server farm to the hydroponic greenhouses, and the various points on campus where she could enter an underground bunker during an asteroid drill. 

In fact, looking at this feed of the Pluto base was almost all she did these days, aside from work. Sleep came third, eating a distant fourth thanks to Victuquick™. Ana was pretty sure that the reason she felt so disconnected from her body lately was because of how little time she was spending on the needs of the flesh. Sometimes when she looked in the mirror, her face looked oddly unfamiliar to her—it wasn’t that she didn’t recognize her own face; it was more like how, when you walk around in high heels for a long time and then take them off, it feels weird to walk normally. 

She would eventually need to decide a number of things based on the information this camera drone could provide to her—things like whether to live in the barracks or the dorms,[4] and where she would want to be located on campus based on her needs and habits (both current and projected). After all, she was picking up stakes and moving to a whole different stellar system, presumably never to return, and probably without even keeping in touch with a single person from civilization. 

Ana switched off the feed in disgust. She would make those plans tomorrow. For now, she was sick of thinking about the whole situation. The fight with Arch had set her own mind against her, when she was used to it being her greatest ally, her most potent weapon. The rhythms and routines on which she had based her life were drifting out of order, and since Ana defined herself and was defined by these habits, it meant Ana herself was drifting. 

On a whim, she switched her screen over to Reinhard Chopra’s vidfeed, and was presented with a wide view of the moon where she had spent the last four years, barely ever returning home. RCC looked more like a typical top-shelf college, with more modern and pretty-looking architecture than Pluto. Many of the buildings were almost completely naked, that is, not covered by stellar panels—RCC was flaunting its wealth by showing that it did not need to devote every inch of outside building space to creating more stellar energy. 

She caught a glimpse of rock-orange over the moon’s horizon. India was rising from the camera’s viewpoint. It really was a beautiful planet in its way. The electric blue storms that drifted in slow motion through the upper reaches of its atmosphere made it look like there were huge oceans on its surface; ironic, considering H2O didn’t naturally occur in India’s environment. The planet itself had been called Salvador Dali’s rendition of the Grand Canyon, with its spires of alarmingly orange rock twisting upwards in spires and sprays like blown glass, and deep chasms that generations ago had flowed with liquid nitrogen, silt from underground lakes staining it black as the river Styx. 

Orange, blue, and black. All in the most inhospitable, alien hues possible to the eyes of human colonists 500 years ago.[5] On an even more whimsical whim, she pulled up the selection of feeds from the planet’s surface, and selected one near her parents’ house, in the neighborhood where she had grown up. 

India had never been a great planet to walk around on without a life-support suit, but it was certainly the worst in that regard now. The feed was almost obscured by the clouds of toxic gas on the surface. A system of metal tubes marked covered roadways, intersecting at the habitat bubbles that were the larger cities and towns. From above it was gray on orange, but mostly just fog. The real beauty of India was looking upward into the psychedelic colors of its atmosphere, so this view was hardly showing the planet in its best light. 

At the sound of footsteps outside her door, she tensed and lost her train of thought, closing the feed of India and opening a class reading. After enough time had passed to verify the footsteps weren’t Katya coming back from class, she relaxed. She hated when people could see what she was doing on her screens, so whenever Katya was around Ana always had a decoy tab to switch to if she came too close. Ana had even taken to using her screens while facing toward Katya’s bed, blocking her from seeing what she was doing, instead of her customary position at the foot of her bed, where she could see the video feed of the moon’s surface that was the room’s main decoration. 

Despite her discomfiture with Katya’s presence in the room, Ana had been spending more time in her room, specifically in bed, than ever. Not sleeping, of course. She had spent most of the past few weeks aimlessly reading trivia on her screens, while waiting for a reply to her complaint to the RCC anthropology department about not having been assigned a thesis advisor. She was contemplating sending a follow-up complaint, and then repeating this action every day until she got an answer. After six weeks of classes, she felt that would be justified. 

Every now and then she would open up her inbox and will it to manifest an email telling her that her advisor had been assigned and that her thesis could move forward. She would just stare at her inbox, refreshing occasionally, even though her computer displayed everything in real time such that refreshing was a meaningless action. 

She opened her inbox now, and without meaning to (she never meant to) slipped into this habit again. Her inbox had zero unread messages, and her read messages were tediously sorted for her by a bot, written by Arch, with much input from Ana, which categorized her emails by subject with a specificity that made the folder tree look like Phylum Chordata. She stared into the blank screen for some time, full of indignance at the message’s non-appearance. 

But then, to Ana’s surprise, the message actually did appear. Sometimes things like that happen. Ana immediately opened the message, to find: 

_Dear Ms. Kepler,_

_We hope this message finds you well. We write to inform you that your undergraduate thesis advisor has been assigned—you will be working with Professor Zelda Pfeiffer, whose work in the Children’s Media Criticism department seems relevant to your work on Walt Disney._

Well, that’s ridiculous, thought Ana. That idea was about Walt Disney’s political career, not his artistic one. Children’s Media Criticism won’t help me at all. She continued to read:

_Unfortunately, since your thesis work has been delayed for six weeks, the timeline for its completion will need to be accelerated. As you know, most of your peers submitted proposals in the first weeks of the semester, and are currently working with their advisors to amass the bulk of their research and create outlines of their final papers, which will be approved at the end of this semester, for execution next semester. If we want to keep you on schedule, you will need to perform the work of one full semester, in less than half of one._

_We realize this is an extreme expectation, but must regretfully inform you that these measures will be absolutely necessary for you to earn your degree—that is, unless you would like to stay on at RCC for another semester, in which case your tuition check can be sent to the same place as always. However, we understand that your commitment at the Pluto grad program makes this impossible, and in fact that your acceptance at Pluto is conditional on a successful thesis here within this academic year. Therefore, we assume you will begin working with Professor Pfeiffer post haste to catch up to your classmates._

_As always, we are delighted to have you studying with us at RCC. You are a pleasure to have in class._

_Yours, etc.,_

_Dean Chopra-Pichai_

Ana switched off her screen completely, and lay down on her bed. This seemed as good a time as any to stare at the ceiling. She was sure that even a few weeks ago she would have found this assignment an exciting challenge, a Herculean task to be conquered. Now she was wondering how long she could lay here doing nothing without her whole life bursting into flames. Then she realized the email she had just read was her whole life bursting into flames. 

There was no way she could get the work for RCC and Pluto done by the end of the semester. Of course, if she didn’t get the RCC work done, she wouldn’t have to bother doing the Pluto work at all. 

She gave herself a mental slap. _You’ve got to pull yourself together._ She said to herself sternly. _So you have no free time, even for sleep, for the next six weeks. You don’t need free time or sleep anyway. You never have._ She realized her pep talk would be more effective if it were in a mirror. She jumped up, noticing that some of her old bloodlust for life had already returned, and faced herself in the bathroom mirror, which was really just a screen showing the feedback from a camera. She resumed: 

_So the only person you talk to online, and the only person you’ve ever loved, including your parents and childhood dog, is out of your life for good. Clearly love was a mistake. Serves you right for seeking out human connection. What you need isn't oxytocin, but dopamine! Not the complacency of affection, but the thrill of achievement! And amid your victory, love too will be conquered!_

She felt her thoughts falling into formation, like a Roman legion. She didn’t have to redirect a single one. She sent each of her advisors an email to set up a meeting the next day. In the meantime, she could certainly get together enough research in the next 24 hours to not be completely unprepared for those meetings. Within a few minutes of frenzied typing and swiping on the school library, she had opened a window for each thesis, and filled them with tabs of anything with even a footnote’s worth of information.[6]

This would work. She could do this. After all, this was what academics in the real world did on a regular basis; this was what Ana had been wanting to do her whole life. The rest of this semester would be practice for her future in full-time academia. This was exciting. She was excited. 

Over the course of the next week, Ana would become much less excited. 

~ ~ ~ 

Ana barely even noticed the taste of the Victuquick™ she was chugging. She had taken a mag-lev train to the faculty building to meet with her advisor in zir office. She had only been in the faculty building a couple of times before, since most teachers preferred to do video calls instead—after all, why have students waste 45 minutes on the train? With that in mind, she took it as a good sign that her advisor was taking this seriously enough to want an in-person meeting—after being neglected by RCC for the whole semester, she was glad to learn she would be dealing with someone who actually cared about her thesis from now on. Waiting outside Professor Pfeiffer's office, she had another momentary flash of annoyance that she had been given a Children’s Media Criticism professor instead of someone whose work actually related to her thesis. But she redirected the angry thought. No more focusing on negativity. From now on, the free-floating irritation that she directed at anyone and everyone in her immediate vicinity was going the way of Arch Thoughts. That is, it was not going to be happening in her head anymore. She had decided this. 

The meeting was fast and hard as a slap to the face. “Afternoon. Zelda Pfeiffer. Before you ask, I was not named for the Zelda in video games. Zelda is an old Germanic name, which my great-grandfather picked out of a book of German baby names when he and the rest of my family emigrated to Deutschwelt. He wasn’t familiar with the more recent use of the name. My family did, however, take the surname “Pfeiffer” in honor of the classical rom-com actress.”[7] Professor Pfeiffer rattled this off at a businesslike clip, without looking up from zir screen or even ceasing to type. It seemed like ze had delivered the speech enough times that ze could easily multitask during it. “Finally, yes, my pronouns ze/zir are comical considering that my name begins with “Ze,” but let’s be professional, hm?” 

“All of that is quite fascinating, Professor Pfeiffer.” Professor Pfeiffer didn’t respond, or even ask Ana to call zir “Zelda,” which was the usual informal ritual between students and teachers. Ana endured a few seconds of silence, then: “Did you know that the Zelda video games actually started out as children’s media?” Not that many people knew that. It crossed Ana’s mind that whenever she had cause to make small talk with someone, she ended up using “actually” or "did you know" as key phrases. 

“I am a children’s media professor named Zelda. How could I not know that?” Professor Pfeiffer still hadn’t looked up or stopped typing. “Excuse me for a moment, I’m about to beat a high score on something.” 

“Of course.” Ana tried to look as solemn as Professor Pfeiffer did as she logged the rapid keystrokes of whatever game she was playing. She resisted the urge to look at her own screen, since the impoliteness she was being shown obviously was not meant to go two ways. The daylight panel buzzed overhead as it filled the room with blue light designed to promote alertness and energy; when Ana looked up she could see a few dead bugs[8] behind the glass. 

“Yesssss.” Professor Pfeiffer finally muttered to herself. She finished typing with a flourish and wriggled her fingers at her screen in a series of twitchy commands. Then she flipped her screen around to where both she and Ana could see; the screen, enlarged almost to tv size, now showed Ana’s work so far on her thesis. The screen also showed a few other windows about Ana that contained information Ana hadn’t actually been aware teachers had access to. How do they know my usual orders at all those restaurants? And why?![9]

“Ana, I have some concerns about this draft of your proposal that you’ve submitted to me.” 

“Oh? It’s rough, of course; that was my reason for setting up this meeting in the first place.” Ana didn’t see what a Children’s Media Studies professor could have to say about her annotated bibliography so far. After all, she hadn’t even hammered out a thesis[10] at this point; she had only pulled the most basic assortment of sources on her new topic of choice: HBO’s gritty reboot of Riverdale, which re-vitalized the dying network during the 2040s by marrying teen drama to the “blood and boobs” media that HBO itself had pioneered. 

“It is very rough, yes.” This advisor was almost the opposite of Gerhardt; where Gerhardt was always beatifically smiling, with Zelda everything seemed to elicit a quizzical eyebrow raise, or an unimpressed blink. “Let’s go over the draft together, shall we?” 

She full-screened Ana’s proposal document: 

_Anna Kepler  
Reinhard Chopra College  
Senior Thesis  
Annotated Bibliography _

_Source: Darrow, Eridan. “All Men Must Die, Archiekins: Game of Thrones’s Influence on HBO’s Riverdale.” Blood and Boobs and Bibliographies: A Journal of Media Titillation. Vol. 32, No. 89, pp. 1102-1455._

_Commentary: The connection to Game of Thrones will be important to my thinking when analyzing Riverdale’s story structure in contrast with the less popular 2010s incarnation. There are bountiful parallels to choose from, like the plotline introduced in season three where Jughead’s little sister Jellybean travels to nearby Greendale in order to train as an assassin, or Greendale resident Sabrina “The Teenage Witch” Spellman moving to Riverdale to start a cult based on a fire god who has apparently granted her shadow magic._

“I was surprised you chose Game of Thrones to analyze for this paper, since the plotlines involving the South Side Serpents make shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad a lot more appropriate for the genre.” Zelda fired off the question with the same practiced rapidity as the speech about her name. 

“I can certainly incorporate analyses of those shows as well.” Ana managed. 

“See that you do. What, in fact, was the relevance of Game of Thrones to your developing thesis?” Zelda was practically acting like this was Ana’s thesis defense. What was going on? 

Ana had no thesis whatsoever so far, so the relevance of Game of Thrones to that thesis was completely unclear to her. “Well, so far my focus is fairly general. I want to look at the development and production conditions of HBO’s Riverdale, and compare it to other “blood and boobs” media of the time.” 

“Is that all you had in mind?” 

Ana blinked. “Um—“ 

“Moving on.” 

_Source: Gamzee, Kanye. “From Archie Comics to Riverdale: De-Centering the Straight Male Subject in Archie Media.” Blood and Boobs and Bibliographies: A Journal of Media Titillation. Vol. 32, No. 89, pp. 1500-1763._

_Commentary: Anyone who has watched Riverdale and studied the original comics knows that the character Archie is noticeably less central to the plot in the later TV incarnations of the story. In fact, Archie is arguably the least important character in a story revolving around Hiram Lodge’s political machinations, the South Side Serpents and their internal power struggles, and Betty investigating various murders around town. This book explores how the Archie franchise was broadened and diversified for wider appeal._

“So, feminism in Archie media?” 

“Er, definitely a fruitful area for research.” 

“I see.” 

_Source: Karkat, X Æ A-Xii. ‘What’s Wrong?’ ‘Men!’ Or, How Betty and Veronica Went From Male Fantasy to Female Empowerment In Archie Media. Reinhard Chopra University Press, 3377._

_Commentary: The book is named for an iconic Archie comics panel in which Betty asks Veronica what’s wrong and Veronica replies“Men!”[11]This book examines the development of Betty and Veronica’s relationship, first in the preceding Riverdale adaptation on the CW (another American TV station), and then in HBO’s version. In the CW’s Riverdale, Betty and Veronica seemed set up to fight over Archie as they often do in the comics, but instead the two were unfailingly supportive of each other throughout the series, with Betty being paired off with Jughead as a way to disperse the tension of her crush on Archie. In the HBO show, after Betty becomes the head of the South Side Serpents by consuming a live snake in front of the entire gang, she is set up as a political rival to Veronica, who has taken control of the Lodge family fortune after murdering her father with a crossbow. However, even then the two best friends worked together instead of turning on each other. _

“That paragraph about Betty and Veronica was rather long for an annotation,” Zelda muttered as she flicked through the document to show the next set of sources. “All that was necessary was a brief summary of how useful the source would be to you.” 

“I was zealous.” Ana managed. 

“Clearly.” Zelda said shortly, continuing her flicking. “These last two sources have essentially nothing to do with the first one. One is about the effect of Game of Thrones on Riverdale, while the others are about the progress of feminism in Riverdale. How are you going to be examining how Riverdale was influenced by other blood and boobs media, while also arguing that it was feminist?” 

“Some scholars consider blood and boobs media to be feminist, actually. The naked female characters kill people too, after all.” 

“Ana, this is a top-tier academic institution, and I am a laureate professor. Please do not waste my time.” 

“Sorry.” 

“You’re going to have to get these annotations in order before you submit your proposal. We can start with a new and expanded resource list, and a more focused topic.” 

Ana swallowed. “Like what?” 

Zelda clearly thought less of her for having had to ask that question at all. She sighed. “What exactly about HBO’s Riverdale will you be studying? You seem to be circling around gender politics, and in an empire as rigidly patriarchal as 21st century American Imperialism you’ve got a lot to work with, but I need even more focus. The Betty/ Veronica virgin/ whore complex thing is interesting, but played out. You need a more original area of study.” 

“Um….like what?” Ana had never experienced this feeling before, of falling and shrinking at the same time, and she did not like it. 

“Well, Veronica always calls Archie “Archiekins,” right? So what does him being a kin of himself have to do with the plot?” 

~~~ 

That didn’t matter. Two days later, Ana had just finished one of her now-typical mental rehashings of that discussion, and had concluded once again that it didn’t matter. She would do the new resource list and find a better topic. She had to do it. So she would. Even if it meant talking about Archie being a kin when the “Archiekins” nickname came from the comic books and was thus contextualized in the time period of the comic books, long before the coining of the term “kin.” That didn’t matter. 

It was now nine minutes past when Gerhardt had been scheduled to call her, which was enough to throw her entire perfectly thought-out day off track. If she got through the thirty-minute conversation in less than 21 minutes, she could stay on schedule—or she could save nine minutes on any of her other tasks for the day. Or she could save one minute on nine separate tasks, or for that matter, two minutes from four tasks plus one minute from one task. Or three minutes from three tasks. Or four from two, and one from one. And there she was, gone full circle once again, in a day/week/month/year when that seemed to be the only thing she was really doing. 

She took another pull of her Stimusip™. Stimusip™ was the dark companion to her Victuquick™ regimen; a cocktail of nootropics and good old fashioned drugs that rivalled any 50s housewife for sheer neurochemical irresponsibility. Ana wished Victuquick™ was available mixed with Stimusip™ so the two pillars of her food pyramid, if that made architectural sense, could be merged into one. But alas, this was outlawed by the Indian government. Apparently consumable products classified as “nutrition” rather than “recreation” could not have habit-forming substances in them—aside from the ingredients actually necessary to make the food, of course.[12]

Her screen lit up with a call from Gerhardt; she minimized her other windows and her other thoughts before she answered. 

“Wie geht’s, Fraulein Kepler!” Gerhardt always forgot Ana was not German in any real sense of the word. She barely spoke it, and she looked nothing like a German person would have on Earth, though that was basically irrelevant now. Gerhardt’s dark skin, for instance, would have been unheard of in the Germany of Bismarck and Beowulf. 

“Ja! Hallo, Herr Professor!” But Ana wasn’t above putting her middle-school German to use if it would get her in Gerhardt’s good graces. “I hope you’ve found my most recent research to be in Ordnung!” 

“Ah, yes. We will talk about that.” Gerhardt seemed oblivious to the fact that he had put that in the most anxiety-inducing way possible. Continuing the theme, he proceeded to engage Ana in small talk about the Inner Ring for a full ten of the precious 21 minutes left of their alloted conversation time. Gerhardt was, as anyone with a brain could have guessed, from Deutschwelt, and missed it with a passion that completely belied the fact that Ana lived almost all the way across the Inner Ring from Deutschwelt. 

After she failed to have the information he was looking for on yet another extremely local Deutschwelt concern (why doesn’t he look it up online?! she wondered), Ana despaired of getting through the meeting on schedule. If she was going to get through all her work for the day, she would definitely have to save the nine x 1 minutes, or 4 x 2 + 1 minutes, or 3 x 3 minutes, or— 

“Undergraduate Kepler, we on the board have talked it over, and we think you need to switch your topic.” A moment ago, Gerhardt was brimming with delight over Spargel, speaking in the same jovial manner he had used from their very first video chat onward. Now he sounded more like he was reading meeting minutes than confidentially telling her about his non-regulation floral capri pants. “We realize you will need time to find and research a new subject, and are willing to give you an extension until the end of the semester.” 

Ana was relieved, until she realized that wasn’t an extension at all. “But my proposal was already due at the end of the semester, correct?” This was a retraction, not an extension, since now that she had to find a new topic there was more work to do in the time before the same deadline as before. 

“Oh my, no, Ana! Your proposal was due in two weeks! My word… Is that perhaps why your work so far has been at a, shall we say, lackadaisical pace?” Ana felt her limbic system activate at that suggestion. She hadn’t been lackadaisical since she was in diapers. 

“It was my understanding I had been meeting our agreed-upon deadlines.” Ana hoped the ice seeping through her veins hadn’t yet reached her voice. 

“Well yes, kleine Ana, but the deadlines are, how shall I put this, the bare minimum? They are, to phrase it gently, a very low bar? To only meet them without exceeding them is, not to put too fine a point on it, hardly up to the standard we expect of you.” Gerhardt was closer to his usual joviality now, but Ana wasn’t comforted. 

“Well, my apologies for seeming lackadaisical. I did not understand that some of your expectations were meant to be communicated through telepathy. I would have been using my mind-reading powers during these meetings if I had known you would not be giving me instruction through speech alone.” 

Gerhardt’s face grew still across the expanse of space. Ana briefly wondered what physical direction she would need to look to be facing him geographically. Unbidden, the answer came to her that Pluto was roughly behind her, to the left, and 45 degrees downward. She had sent off her graduate school application while facing toward it, she now remembered, like Muslims on Earth had faced toward their holy city to pray, and still turned toward Earth and the ruins of Mecca in the present day. She supposed her prayers had been answered. Then she realized Gerhardt was still looking at her and she had zoned out from stress. He hadn’t said a word. 

“I…apologize for that comment, Major.” She figured the military title was in order now that she had obviously broken the casual behavior patterns that made it unnecessary. “There has been a problem with my thesis proposal here, too, and I am under a lot of strain. This also accounts for my slip-up regarding the due date.” 

“Quite all right, my dear. Unfortunately, I have more bad news to deliver. You cut me off before I could tell it to you.” Ana told herself that whatever this bad news was, it couldn’t possibly have been something Gerhardt just now decided to plague her with out of spite— “You are being placed on academic probation. This means your proposal will be monitored closely, and your admission to the Pluto program may be re-evaluated if certain outcomes…come to pass.” Gerhardt’s use of the passive voice was masterful, Ana couldn’t help but note. 

“And if I submit a successful proposal, I will be taken off this probation?” 

“Let’s consider next steps when there are next steps to be taken.” Gerhardt said sagely. A buzzing seemed to fill Ana’s ears for the rest of their conversation, but she gathered once it was over that they had confirmed her new timeline and that Gerhardt was looking forward to her first batch of research regarding her new topic, which was to be Toxic, of all things. 

So now I have to do a new batch of research on Riverdale, and a new first batch of research on Toxic, while managing not to think about Arch. And then I have to do all the other things I have to do for each of those topics, in the next three weeks. 

“Goodbye, Ana. I hope to see your first batch of new research soon.” Gerhardt didn’t even say goodbye to her in German. It couldn’t have been worse if he had suddenly revealed himself to be wearing a perfectly regulation uniform below-screen. 

After she hung up, Ana turned her screen off completely, dispelling the holographic display and revealing the vindow behind it. Ana stared blankly out the vindow for exactly one minute. Since the call with Gerhardt had been only 20 minutes, she had not only met her goal for saving time, she had surpassed it by a full sixty seconds—but this was one of those situations where you got what you wanted and realized it wasn’t really what you wanted at all. Ana used her one-minute break to force herself back into another self-pep-talk: 

You’ve got to pull yourself together! She thought at herself.You can do this research without thinking of Arch. All you have to do is choose not to think of Arch. So just choose that. Now get out your schedule and figure this out. 

She spread out her windows once more, with her swarming thoughts fanning out in her head at the same time. Her painstaking scheduling flicked into view before her, showing how she had blocked out her work over the next two weeks to get her through everything she needed to do on time. This was with her old topic for Pluto, so she needed to block in the time for re-doing her proposal for Pluto, as well as the extra research time needed for RCC. Even without these changes, all the frantically color-coded blocks of work seemed to buzz in place with stress. 

It took Ana a while to understand the writing on the wall that was spelled out by those blocks of work—it took her about two weeks, to be exact. 

~~~ 

She had now used up over half of the time she had left. She thought she might have figured out the annotated bibliography to Zelda’s satisfaction, but Gerhardt was never going to accept the work she’d done on Toxic. It wasn’t for lack of reading—it was actually the opposite. Ana would get so caught up reading the material she had called up from the library about Toxic purely for pleasure that she would go hours without gathering any useful footnote-fodder for her thesis. In hindsight, she would conclude that she felt closer to Arch during these moments, even when she wasn’t letting herself consciously think of them. 

It was during one of these moments that she realized she was in one of these moments once again. At the end of her rope, she vigorously slapped herself to clear her head. 

“Kepler?” Ana’s stomach twisted at the reminder that someone else shared her space now. 

“Ah. Hello.” Ana smiled at Katya (she hoped). “Not to worry. I have often found gentle physical stimulation to be helpful for my concentration. Contrary to how this may seem, this is nothing out of the ordinary, neither for me nor for humanity in general.” She hoped that sounded normal. 

“Really? Because you’ve been muttering to yourself and doing nothing but read and drink those weird meal replacements for weeks. But whatever. I was going to talk to you even before you slapped yourself. You slapping yourself isn’t far enough out of the ordinary to prompt me to talk to you right now.” Ana dimly became aware that Katya’s voice was more taut and harsh sounding than usual. Turning to fully face Katya for the first time during this conversation, Ana saw that Katya was standing on Ana’s side of the room (rude) and crossing her arms in a body-language sign of aggression. 

“I’m rather busy.” The last thing Ana needed right now was a conversation that involved crossed arms. “Can this wait?” 

“Not really. You threw out my weed terrarium, didn’t you?” Oh. 

Ana had never been a great liar, since she had always existed in worlds where even if she did lie, no one would have the balls to call her out for it due to her social status. “I am unsure what you’re talking about.” 

“I can’t believe you.” Katya looked disgusted. “Actually, wait, I can. The only reason I’ve never reported you to the mental health board these past four years is because I just didn’t care enough. That’s probably the main reason people don’t report you. But you made one mistake: getting between an EM major and drugs.” 

“Katya, our roommate relationship has suited both our needs these past four years. If I threw away your weed terrarium, which had become a fungus terrarium due to neglect, it was only because your absence from the room made it necessary for me to take matters into my own hands. Humans live in space now; we don’t grow our own food.” 

“So just to be clear, you’re saying you didn’t do it, but also if you did it, it was justified?” 

Ana considered a moment. That was her official stance on the matter. “Yes.” 

Katya shook her head slowly. “I already reported you, Kepler. I just came from the office.” 

“For what? Cleaning mold out of the room—“ 

Katya steamrolled over her. How incredibly rude. “Someone at the office who didn’t seem to care about protocol told me you would have been expelled, but instead you’re only getting community service because your parents stepped in at the last minute. You’ll probably get the email today.” 

Ana remembered with a sick feeling in her stomach that she had indeed received an email from the school's admin account that morning, along with one from her mother, but had neglected to open either. That sick feeling intensified when she realized she would have to block in community service sessions for the next week in addition to her work. There had already been negative five hours in the next week in which to complete everything, and now she would be deficient by several dozen hours. Her life, which was already on fire, had just exploded. 

“So you get to stay at RCC because your grandfather used to hang out with Reinhard Chopra or something. But honestly, bitch? You’re still expelled, from this room. Pack your shit and go.” This conversation was an order of magnitude more words than Ana had ever heard from Katya at one time, and Ana had to admit she was getting a very negative impression. 

“Katya, I obviously have no intention of leaving our room.” Despite her total assurance she was right, Ana was still having her characteristic response to conflict of any kind, which was a wave of adrenaline that made everything from her voice to her fingers tend to shake uncontrollably. She hoped Katya didn’t notice, but she wasn’t optimistic. 

“Well then get ready for the rest of the semester to be a non-stop EM-kid party. My friends are going to be in the room from now until we leave for break.” Ana put up a fair show of indifference, but Katya had her number on this one. It would be even more impossible to get everything done with not one but several people in the room at all hours. 

The reason Ana hated living with other people was that when someone literally lives in your home, they’re able to completely fuck up your routine. If they want to, they can take everything you like to have just so and just fuck it all up. She waited to see if Katya would really follow through on her threat, then slunk out the door when the first of Katya’s friends started to arrive. Katya gave her an ironic wave on her way out. 

~~~ 

Reinhard Chopra College was like most institutions in space, in that it was built for lots of people to be able to hang out in random places easily. If an airlock failed in one part of a space station, the goal was for every other part of the space station to be able to accomodate the extra people and perform as many of the functions necessary to sustain them as possible, at least until help arrived. Emergency food in the form of Ana’s beloved Victuquick™ dispensers were all over RCC, and every common room could sleep as many people as could fit on its floor, with bedding that could be pulled like a magician’s hat trick right out of an emergency box on the wall. Likewise, oxygen, water, and power were highly decentralized throughout the college, both when it came to the scrubbers and stellar cells that produced them and the outlets for students to access them. 

These arrangements also made it very convenient for students with roommate problems to avoid going back to their rooms for long periods of time. Every semester at least a few dozen students would end up in this predicament, with finals and mid-terms being a peak season since external stressors put pressure on any relationship. It was a normal enough thing it was clear to everyone who saw you hanging around in a common room at weird hours, with your stuff forming sedimentary layers around you from having been there all day. This meant that those students who had maliciously and without reason taken a dislike to Ana were able to fully enjoy her situation. 

Most kids who ended up in this situation wandered around the college common rooms, like hunter-gatherer nomads following game, but Ana was not a hunter-gatherer. Ana was an agriculturalist. She picked one spot and stuck with it, conforming it to her needs rather than only taking what was readily available. When it became clear to her that she would have to find a new base of operations, she personally inspected every common room she could find on RCC, and finally settled on one that afforded her a vindow looking out over a hydroponics building, since she liked to have a view. It also had what Ana thought of as one of the “good” Victuquick™ dispensaries. Some of the Victuquick™ dispensaries gave out drinks that were kind of warm and stale tasting, but at this one it was always ice-cold and just the right slushy consistency. 

This common room became her room in most senses of the word. Every day, or more typically at random hours of the night, she woke up in this common room and started her day (or, you know, whatever) with a Victuquick™ fresh from the dispensary. Eventually she noticed the Victuquick™ in the dispensary was getting more expensive every day—she realized the Eridani corporation’s algorithm must have noticed the extra demand at that location and increased the price. Her choices were to take the surge pricing, or wander around to the other Victuquick™ dispensers around RCC. Since price was no obstacle but time was, she continued buying from the common room’s dispenser, until she noticed no one who visited the dispenser was able to afford the Victuquicks™ from that location anymore. More for her. 

She hadn’t gone to class for most of the semester because it was beneath her, but now she double wasn’t going to class. People learned to stay out of the common room, since if they tried to hang out in there they would find her either frantically typing and shushing everything that made a sound in her vicinity, or chugging Victuquick™ with a dead-eyed expression on her face and daring anyone who came in to engage her in their pathetically mundane idea of conversation. 

But the thing was: even as she kept doing the work, following the colored blocks on her schedule, picking up all her stuff and dutifully reporting to the hydroponics station for her community service when it was time, drinking her Victuquick™ at the appointed time that she had calculated was optimal for continuous alertness and productivity, she knew it was already over. She wasn’t going to Pluto, and she wasn’t going to stay at RCC. But she couldn't stop trying. She knew if she just pushed a little farther, worked a little faster, that could all change. She was like a gambler on a losing streak, convinced the next hand would be her big win. But she felt none of the euphoria of recreational risk-taking now. It was more like her mind was the moon-trolley, going back and forth between the same two points, but never deviating from its path. What was she going to do; break through the tunnel wall? 

She had only been inhabiting the common room for a few days, but she somehow felt like she had been living here her entire four years at RCC. Katya? Gerhardt? Even Arch? They were as far away as her parents’ home down on India’s surface. The only thing she felt like she had interacted with in the past thousand years or so was the work. At the very farthest reaches of her mind she could tell something was wrong, even if she wouldn’t even let the thoughts come close enough to hear them in her mind’s eye. Ear. Whatever. 

The real downward slope started with becoming more aware of her body. Not in a positive yoga way—or at least, Ana doubted this was what yoga did. She would look down at her fingers typing, convulsing over the keyboard like epileptic spiders, and start thinking about the tendons and ligaments and hundreds of tiny tiny bones that allowed them to intercept the light beams in each key of the holographic keyboard to let her screen know the key had been pressed. 

When she looked in a mirror she had the overwhelming urge to grab her skin and pull on it, to see if it came away from the bone. What was this warm, firm putty that encased her? What were these mineral deposits holding it all together from the inside? Was this collection of facial features supposed to resolve into someone she knew? 

This amalgam of fluids and solids all working in tandem made her feel a bit like a machine, but again, not in a positive way. Ana often fantasized about uploading, becoming a being of pure information by fusing her mind with the cloud, but this was different. After all, if she uploaded herself to the cloud, she would know how everything in her worked, and why. Perfect, idealized binary code mapping out the ones and zeros, the yeses and nos, of her entire being. Something’s wrong? Flip a switch from on to off. Do that millions of times until the whole system is following a different set of commands. Instead, she looked into her body and brain like an explorer into thick, dark jungle. What was lurking inside it, carrying out its processes without her knowledge? What was it doing to her? 

The body fires millions of nerve signals from the brain to the muscles and organs, and the brain sends those signals because of the other signals it’s already pinging back and forth within itself. Who set this electronic clockwork in motion? And what was she, the being who lived inside? If her mind was a clock, then was she the clockmaker, or just a hand that pointed to whatever number her internal machinery dictated? Does the clock ever stop to wonder why it marks the time? Does it suspect there’s something pathological in its machinery, compelling it to repeat the same twelve hour cycle, go around in the same circles, without ever seeking to change? Would it blame the clockmaker, or would it internalize the blame into self-hatred? 

From a wide enough view, all organisms were the same. Single cells blindly dividing. Neurons firing toward whatever will give them their next dopamine hit. Cockroaches skittering under a bed. Lizards seeking warmth from the sun. Cows chewing cud over and over to pre-digest it. Humans creating complex social systems and empires just to efficiently distribute food and sex. 

Sometimes when she had gone long enough without sleep or food (so always, now), she would look around at the horde of people around her and be sick with them. The way humans lumber around, sucking on their food, leering at potential sexual partners. At the core of each of us is a cow, and a lizard, and a wide-eyed, gape-mouthed fish. Was it any wonder Ana looked forward to freeing herself? 

Ana had been in the common room for several days before she started feeling for her pulse on different arteries, stretching open her eyelids to see the veins underneath, poking and prodding at this flesh body that tethered her to the blind, seeking, sluglike crawl of evolution. If she pushed her fingernail too far into her skin, the neurons sent a signal meaning pain to her brain until she stopped. If she shone a light into her eye, the pupil would dilate of its own accord. She looked for herself in her face until it was like a word said over and over until it becomes meaningless. 

But why, Ana, one might ask (she imagined), why are you so uncomfortable with your corporeal form? Is it really so bad for your mental faculties to be imprisoned in a vessel so weak, a neural system so irrational? Is it so awful that your pleasure and pain circuits can hijack your thoughts with addictions and obsessions that derail your ambitions? Are you that ill at ease with your need for love? 

And she screamed in her mind, YES, because the horror of it was unbearable. Because it meant her mind, and everything she used her mind to understand, meant nothing. She was only a chimpanzee, huddled in a zoo on a moon in space while systems beyond her comprehension, systems of money, of government, of DNA, manipulated her without her knowledge or consent. The narratives of her society, her petty concerns, her highest life goals, were the jungle backgrounds painted on the walls—did the animals actually believe those were real trees? She was sure government surveillance associate assigned to her watched her activities with the same detached interest as a child looking at an animal on display. 

Her work had made her feel human. And—she couldn’t block it out anymore—so had Arch. Talking to Arch had been another thing in her life that was something more than consumption and excretion. This body would be jettisoned into the void when she died, but her work, and what she and Arch had felt for each other, did not exist in these cells that held her consciousness; they were not bound by the physical world and its rules. But now what she and Arch had had was dead anyway, and so was her academic career. 

Did that mean she herself was dead? In a certain sense, she supposed so. And in that same certain sense, she was beginning to be gripped by the dawning knowledge that she had been dead for a long time before she and Arch had stopped speaking. 

_You’ve got to pull yourself together. Life is a meaningless maelstrom of suffering, and no one even gets out alive. If you had gone to Pluto, you would never have been happy. Staying here, you’ll never be happy. The outcome is the same. You’re alone. So you might as well be alone and kick some ass._

Arch. Arch. Arch. From the bottom of the emotional well she had thrown herself into, it was at least one good thing to be able to say their name to herself after months of resisting anything that reminded her of them. It almost felt like she had forgotten it and was just now remembering. She whispered it softly: “Arch, Arch, Arch.” 

She registered movement on her screen. With an impatient crick of her pinky, the screen sought her on the couch, zeroing in on her with facial recognition.[13] This is how Ana found herself lying on the couch with the chat records between her and Arch staring down at her from above like they were about to initiate sex. When she had murmured Arch’s name, it must have triggered her rarely-used voice activated controls and her screen had assumed she wanted to message Arch. Ana realized that her screen had assumed correctly, and that after a day where she had been too busy thinking about the pulley systems of her bones to find a single new source for either of her theses, she suddenly had her full supply of motivation back. 

She kept slipping into other windows or clicking random buttons as her fingers twitched in ways she didn’t tell them to, but she managed to type out: 

Hi.  
Are you there?  
I have to talk to you.  
I miss you.  
……..  
I need you.  
……..  
Please answer.

Well. At least she had gotten one productive thing done today. Once Arch read her pathetic plea for emotional support, whatever they had been doing for the past four years would finally be over. Perhaps if she begged for extensions on her theses, she could purge these emotions from her system in time to make her new deadlines and go to Pluto after all. After all, she had dealt with unmanageable workloads before without breaking a sweat. It was all about blocking it out on the calendar. Suddenly she was able to ignore the fact that her consciousness only existed because of oxygen slipping through her blood-brain barrier. 

It was the attachment she had felt to her relationship with Arch that had been throwing off her focus all semester. Letting everything fester with Arch’s stupid cognitive behavioral therapy was a mistake. Cognitive behavioral therapy was just the kind of weak avoidance Arch would stoop to. People like Ana, who understood what it meant to strive and conquer, knew they had to meet their problems head on. 

She stared at the chat for a full six hours. She spent that six hours in the same kind of mental state as before, but this time with added consideration for what Arch might be doing at that moment. Arch’s social media feeds were no help, as usual, because their feeds were all just posts their parents’ PR people put together from the feed from their screen camera and a predictive text emulator that wrote the way they typed. Still, she checked the five most fashionable social media sites, along with the five sites that were mandated by the government, and another five she knew Arch to have profiles on because it served their parents’ opaque business interests. 

Her blood turned cold when she saw Arch was at a party.[14] The Arch she had known for the past four years never went to parties, much less one that was hosted by— 

The social club. The professional fraternity. Whatever they called it. Had Ana abandoning Arch left them defenseless against cult brainwashing? What designs did this roommate of Arch’s have on them? 

She thought she couldn’t get any more stressed, but then her chat pinged: 

What are you doing talking to me? 

Footnotes

1 You call them solar panels? How Earth-centric. [return to text]

2 On Alexandria (where taste is generally secondary to ostentation) they even put facades of Greek columns on the outsides of their satellites. As in, to make it look like the columns are a major structural element of the satellites. Thankfully almost no one looks at the outsides of satellites, though that just makes putting the Greek columns there even more ostentatious. [return to text]

3Rotini.[return to text]

4 If you live in the barracks you get a much more rigorous mandatory exercise routine, but much better rations. Oh, and the army can draft you whenever they want if they need an extra body on a mission. But people barely ever die when that happens. Ana eventually decides on the dorms, since a. she doesn’t need better rations due to not eating real food most of the time, and b. the extra exercise and potential military service would waste valuable research time. [return to text]

5 But in fact, there used to be one thing on India that was green. It hadn’t been more than 150 years since India had been colonized when an enterprising young orange-rock farmer (only kind of kidding) discovered a new gemstone unique to the planet. It was such an iridescent green that it set off a kind of craze among the new Indian civilization—people were risking their lives in the wilderness searching for it, or spending all their money to buy it. It occurred naturally, but unpredictably—no one could tell where it would be found. On the surface, deep in the planet’s crust, in canyons, on mountains—it was named Indiscriminite for this very characteristic. India’s aristocrats made some of the most beautiful architecture in the galaxy out of Indiscriminite, but unfortunately, the craze soon exhausted India’s supply of it. The next batch might form over the next thousand years. Or not. Ana has several Indiscriminite trinkets in her room, which is why she always ensures her door is securely locked before she goes gallivanting off to the admin building. [return to text]

6 Footnotes are important! [return to text]

7 I know what you’re thinking: in a world where even the most minute data on any given person is a matter of digital record, how in the heck do people change their last names? Well: during the Exodus, almost everyone’s personal data was lost. Humanity had kind of procrastinated dealing with global warming, so things were at an advanced stage of breakdown. This was especially true in Russia, where as has been mentioned they were building their ships on Earth while the population was bombarded with radiation, toxic pollution, and their own vodka consumption. This exposure is thought to be a cause for the madness of Emperor Yuri the Genocide, among many other social ills of Novaya Russiya (well, новая россия, but you know).  
Anyway: colony ships were being launched from Orlando, Beijing, and Moscow, and global transit had broken down enough that everyone who was going to make it to those cities was already there. The space programs took what they could get: often all you needed to be accepted into a space training program was a working reproductive system (not so common by that time) and a not-obviously-psychopathic mental state. They tried background checks, but as city after city blacked out, there weren’t always accessible records, and when there were, often the bureaucrat you needed to talk to for permissions was either dead or trying to build an empire of bones out of the ashes of the old world. So the space programs just went by the honor system, which meant some applicants got to ditch last names that were too embarrassingly long and hard to pronounce. Many people on Old Earth had always dreamed of this opportunity.  
The same data loss happened with the First Wave of planets, because interstellar internet was basically not a thing until the high renaissance period of Ana’s ring of civilization. The colony ships kept manifests of their passengers, but the colonists turned out to have a habit of mutinying--that's what happens when you try to send colonists to a new planet without forgiving their student loan debts or giving them health insurance. [return to text]

8 Most space stations have hydroponics facilities of some kind, since even habitats that have easy access to resources from on-planet find it easier to save on fuel and grow part of their own food supply. (Haven’t you ever heard of eating local?) Where there are plants, there generally need to be pollenizing agents, so if you don’t feel like paying for bots that will fuck each of your plants individually, you should get a colony of bees for your crops. There’s also a whole bunch of other bacteria and symbiotic lifeforms that are necessary for plant growth, and which can easily get out of the hydroponic facility. In fact, these organisms get out of hydroponic areas so frequently that humans who grow up in life-supported habitats like space stations are immunized to them just like humans on Earth were.a That's why you have to get shots before moving to space! Bugs and other pests from on-planet (like these nasty rat-lizard things on India) come up into space along with people, too. Life finds a way. Isn’t it beautiful?  
a. This is one reason why people who grow up in space are often considered quite attractive planet-side—they have extremely different immune systems than everyone else, so anyone who gets close enough to smell their sweat is a goner. [return to text]

9 People who pay extra for guac on their burrito are more likely to be politically liberal. It’s that kind of data that can crucially tip the scales during student council elections and those teacher evaluations you have to do on the last day of every class. [return to text]

10 “Thesis” here means both the hugely important high-stakes paper Ana has to write to graduate from RCC and maintain her place in the Pluto grad program, as well as the main argument that Ana will be making in that hugely important high-stakes paper. The strength of her thesis will be judged on her ability to prove the thesis’s thesis. The main body of her thesis should support and develop her thesis. She needs to come up with a thesis before she can write her thesis. [return to text]

11 The panel might actually be apocryphal. [return to text]

12 Ana had been living in space for so long she forgot people on-planet could eat sugar often enough to get addicted to it. Though since her embryonic fluid had been sugar-free, that was never really a danger for her even before she moved to space. [return to text]

13 Not to interrupt Ana’s critical moment, but this is considered a fairly douchey thing to do under other circumstances. It’s kind of like gunning your motor while driving a car, or owning a Google Glass. [return to text]

14 Oh hey, that thing that was happening! [return to text]


	21. Chatlog 11-01-3434-0030

Chatlog 11-01-3434-0030

Arch: What are you doing talking to me? 

Ana: I know this is…abrupt. 

Arch: Abruptness is not what I have a problem with here. 

[Ana is typing] 

[Ana is typing] 

Ana: I know these past few months have been challenging. 

Arch: Challenging. 

Ana: Yes. For both of us. 

Arch: For both of us. 

Ana: …Yes. 

Ana: Things have been hard for me. 

Ana: Without you. 

Arch: ………. 

Ana: I know I have acted… 

[Ana is typing] 

[Ana is typing] 

Arch: “Stop typing things out and deleting them. Just talk to me.” 

Ana: …….. 

Ana: I suppose I deserve that. 

Ana: I was typing for a long time because I wanted to be sure I was saying the right thing. 

Arch: Well, I’m trying to get you to respond to me immediately, 

Arch: Because I think I deserve instant gratification and total access to you, 

Arch: And also because I don’t want to give you time to think about what you’re saying, 

Arch: Because it gives me more control over the conversation when you’re inarticulate. 

Ana: Those were not my motivations. 

Arch: Maybe they weren’t. 

Arch: But you would never admit to them if they were. 

Ana: You seem quite angry. 

Arch: Oh, do I? 

Ana: Yes. 

Ana: That was not my intent. 

Arch: I think I know exactly what your intent was, thanks. 

Ana: Well, you might be surprised. 

Ana: You seem to have the idea that my intent was malicious. 

Arch: Because why the hell would I think that? 

Arch: You've acted with nothing but goodwill, after all. 

Ana: ....... 

Ana: The time since we last talked has been fruitful for me. 

Ana: Mentally. Emotionally. 

Arch: What does any of that mean? 

Arch: Are you not blackmailing me anymore? 

Ana: I was never blackmailing you. 

Arch: You know you were. 

Ana: I didn’t think I could do it if you didn’t come with. 

Ana: I didn't think I could...exist. If you didn't come with. 

Ana: Do you remember the night we met? 

Ana: When I showed you my Parks and Rec Blu-rays in my parents' library? 

Arch: I remember. 

Ana: In that moment, I was only thinking of one-upping you. 

Ana: Every moment in that conversation was calculated to establish dominance. 

Ana: You may not have noticed, 

Ana: since I was employing extremely subtle methods. 

Arch: I did notice a bit. 

Ana: Well, I’ve always known you were smart. 

Ana: My point is, 

Ana: I used to think of everything like that. 

Ana: Everything in my life was like that. 

Ana: The fast-paced world of academia leaves no room for compassion. 

Ana: But despite these realities, 

Ana: You make me want to be different. 

Ana: Perhaps you have actually made me different. 

Ana: After all, my life without you is virtually the same as before we met, 

Ana: But I am now much less capable of living it. 

Ana: If my life has not changed, then logically speaking, I must have changed. 

Ana: ……. 

Ana: ……. 

Ana: ……. 

Ana: You’re not typing. 

Ana: Don’t you have a response? 

Arch: I have no idea how to respond to that. 

Arch: You literally weren’t even talking about our actual problem. 

Ana: I believe I was. 

Arch: You were just talking about how you feel about being apart, 

Arch: Without even mentioning why we’ve been apart. 

Ana: ….. 

Ana: I had not addressed it directly, but I was getting to it. 

Arch: Do you even know what these two months have been like for me? 

Arch: After basically sharing thoughts with you for four years? 

Arch: Who am I kidding, of course you do. 

Arch: You knew exactly what you were doing. 

Ana: [Ana is typing] 

Ana: [Ana is typing] 

Ana: It took me a while to accept that you might not come with me to Pluto. 

Ana: [Ana is typing] 

Ana: [Ana is typing] 

Ana: It felt like you were saying we weren’t real. 

Ana: If your life on Alexandria was more important to you than me, 

Ana: it was like that meant I wasn’t important to you at all, 

Arch: No. 

Arch: That’s not it. 

Arch: You thought I would come crawling back to you. 

Arch: You knew how alone I would be, and you thought I wouldn’t be able to take it. 

Ana: You would have been in almost the same situation if I had left for Pluto without you. 

Ana: Near-lightspeed ships cannot receive real-time communications. 

Ana: We would be essentially “pen-pals.” 

Arch: That’s not the point! 

Ana: Please. 

Ana: All I know, is that I need you if I’m going to do this. 

Ana: Whether you’re with me on Pluto or like this, I need you. 

Ana: I cannot believe I thought I could leave you behind, 

Ana: When I have been fighting what we have since the beginning and failing every step of the way. 

Ana: Being together while I am traveling at lightspeed will obviously be difficult, 

Ana: But being without you is not possible. 

Arch: No. 

Ana: So you’ll come with me? 

Arch: No. 

Ana: I don’t understand. 

Arch: I don’t want to be dating you anymore. 

Ana: ……… 

Arch: I mean, I’m already not dating you anymore, 

Arch: So what I’m really saying is that I want to continue not dating you. 

Ana: I never really considered us not to be dating anymore. 

Arch: That would have been useful information two months ago. 

Ana: You can't possibly mean that two months is enough to end a relationship of four years. 

Arch: I honestly don’t know why I thought I could explain this to you. 

Arch: I’m going to log off now. 

Ana: We had a disagreement. 

Ana: After four years of never fighting at all! 

Arch: We fought all the time! 

Ana: Well, we had problems, 

Ana: We have problems, 

Ana: As all relationships do, 

Ana: But we always resolved them quickly. 

Arch: On your terms. 

Ana: You were always happy with my solutions! 

Arch: You just didn’t listen! 

Ana: How am I supposed to read your mind? 

Ana: From now on, when you say you're happy, am I supposed to interrogate you about it until you crack and tell me you were lying? 

Ana: Are you saying you were secretly unhappy for years, 

Ana: And you were planning to just stay like that indefinitely? 

Arch: I hadn’t thought about it, I guess. 

Arch: And now I’m going to go think about other things. 

Arch: Have a nice life, Ana. 

Ana: Arch. This is not over. 

Arch: Yes it is. 

Arch: It’s super over. 

Arch: I’ve been realizing that what we had wasn’t actually real, 

Arch: We were just two really fucked up people who were fucked up in exactly reciprocal ways, 

Arch: But instead of completing each other, like we thought, 

Arch: we just made each other even more fucked up. 

Ana: I do not feel that way. 

Arch: That’s because you’re too fucked up. 

Arch: And I'm tired of it. I

Arch: can't believe I thought we had this special, perfect connection, 

Arch: When really you're just....my mother. 

Ana: ........ 

Ana: What. 

Arch: You were always telling me to make my own choices. 

Arch: This is me doing that. 

Arch: Goodbye, Ana. 

Arch: [Arch has disconnected] 

Ana: Arch, please be reasonable. 

Ana: .......


	22. Chapter 22

Whoever said there were perks to being a wallflower was a goddamn liar. Elizabeth had been waiting for Adam to return with the punch for twenty minutes, and had been waiting for Gem to come back from the bathroom for nineteen. The Outer Ringer probably thought that had been a clever way to ditch her. As if she could successfully execute such a clumsy social gambit at Elizabeth’s own party.

People kept coming over to congratulate her on the party planning, but she deflected all of them after a few pleasantries. She was playing coy tonight. In this moment of success, the best thing she could do was act aloof. She would be elected to student government next year for sure. She even spotted the student senator she was interning with that semester--he gave her a restrained wave, which she took as validation of her existence. 

Elizabeth was relieved to see Adam making his way back to her, though not because she wanted to see him specifically. Adam was lovely, but even if she were engaged to someone she didn’t like at all, she would still enjoy having someone around at parties whose job it was to hang out with her. Unless she was married to Gem Zhao. That would be awful. 

When Adam reached her, she saw he had a rueful look about him. He put a hand on her arm apologetically. “Listen, darling.” Adam only called her darling when other people were around to hear, or when he was about to break some bad news. “There’s been a problem with Proxima’s faction. Again.”

“Oh. That’s too bad.” Elizabeth knew where this was heading. Whenever Bea Proxima decided to make trouble, she and Adam always had to work late nights building a coalition that would get their frenemy faction on board. If she was gauging Adam’s tone correctly, this was about to be one of those late nights. She felt her fingernails begin to work their way into the flesh of her palms.

“Quite.” Adam sighed. “I know you have the party to run, but I have to go back to Voyager’s room and strategize about this. You know how important this is.”

“Yes, I understand completely.” Elizabeth did understand completely. That was what made the blinding rage she was feeling so inconvenient. 

“Beautiful. Meet you for breakfast tomorrow?” Adam didn’t know her well enough to know when she was lying. That, or he didn’t care.

“Of course.” They performed their perfunctory hello/ goodbye kiss on the cheek, and he squeezed her hand like an introductory handshake before turning to go. Elizabeth watched him shoulder his way through the crowd, without being obvious enough for a camera to pick up. You never knew when you were being watched. Or actually, Elizabeth did know when she was being watched--all the time.

“Whatever just happened, you don’t look happy about it.” Gem had found an apple somewhere and was eating it impudently right next to her. 

Elizabeth was about to respond when Arch wandered up to the two of them.

“Hey.” Despite the perfect logistics of the party around them, Arch didn’t look happy. Maybe it was the romantic touch the robotic arm lent them, but their usual waifish looks were having double the effect on Elizabeth tonight. She wondered if Gem could be nudged into going home early, leaving Elizabeth and Arch at the party together. She might not even mind Adam being gone very much in that case…

“I think I need to go home early.” Arch confessed. Their voice was oddly flat, and they seemed to be focusing their eyes on the back wall instead of either Elizabeth or Gem. “But you two stay and have fun. Wouldn’t want to ruin your night.” Elizabeth got the distinct impression that Arch had thought up and mentally rehearsed what they had just said beforehand. She could tell, because she frequently did the same thing. 

Elizabeth glanced at Gem, and saw she had an expression on her face that just about matched what she herself was feeling. How was Elizabeth supposed to get out of talking to Gem now? She had brought Gem to the party; she had invited Gem to the party! It would be unspeakably rude to leave Gem alone among people she didn’t know, even if Elizabeth would be socially comatose if she went around with such an insolent Outer Ring nobody in tow.

“Arch, are you okay?” Gem moved further into Arch’s personal space than was strictly necessary, in Elizabeth’s opinion.

“I’m fine. I just need to…not be here. Anymore.” Arch abruptly took their leave. Gem looked off after them, her face hidden from Elizabeth’s view. 

From across the room, she could see Adam and his good friend Voyager making their way to a shuttle. Bea Proxima and her Proximists could always be counted on to stir up trouble in times like these. Elizabeth wouldn’t have put it past her to have planned this maneuver specifically for tonight, to isolate her during this crucial party. Dragging Adam away from her to deal with the vote was the perfect way to throw off her focus. 

Or so thought Bea Proxima, Elizabeth corrected herself. She was perfectly in control of this situation. Even if she had done nothing the whole party but talk to her own date, her roommate, and…Gem. 

Elizabeth kept her eyes on Adam's receding figure, but she could feel Gem standing next to her. It was like the Outer Ringer put out obnoxious sound waves below human hearing range that affected people subconsciously. She might as well strike up conversation with Gem, though; standing here alone made it look like she couldn’t find anyone to talk to at her own party. Even talking to a weird Outer Ringer was better than that.

When she turned to Gem to make an opening conversational gambit, she was surprised to see Gem watching her. “Didn’t think you’d miss your boyfriend that much.”

“Why would you think I wouldn’t miss Adam?”

“I dunno. I guess I didn’t realize you two are actually friends. I didn’t realize you’d feel just as alone without him as I do without Arch.” This irritated Elizabeth even more. Gem was hardly a life partner to Arch. She could barely even be Arch’s cooking partner, since she didn’t like to actually touch the food. “Why did Adam have to leave, anyway?”

Elizabeth didn’t know whether the party was bugged—by people other than her, that is. She had the student council drones sweeping the place vigorously, but the perennial arms race between student espionage and student counterintelligence was a constantly shifting balance. “Just some red tape. Annoying, but you know how it is.” Saying something like “you know how it is” to Gem, who definitely did not know how it was, made the deflection sound even more false.

“What are you gonna do with him gone?”

“I have responsibilities. I told you, I was in charge of planning this party.”

“You didn't tell me that.” 

“Of course I did.”

“You basically haven’t talked to me since we decided on the friendship schedule.”

“What about when I invited you to the party?”

“You didn’t say anything about how you were planning the party. If anything I thought a bunch of servants were planning the party.”

“Why would a servant be trusted on matters of taste like that? Could a servant pick out a color scheme for the decor, or put together a seating chart?”

“From your tone, I’m inferring no.” Gem smirked, then glanced around. “So when you say you planned this whole thing, what level of planning are we talking here?” 

“What do you mean?”

“Like, did you…wait, I don’t know anything about what’s involved with planning parties. I can’t even ask clarification questions.”

Elizabeth felt a sigh of exasperation building up inside her, then realized that around Gem it didn’t matter if she did the impolite thing and let it out. The sigh was long and luxurious. “Well, to start I put together a guest list of the top people in student council, the most eligible freshmen and sophomores who will qualify for the council in the coming years, all the people who are student-council-adjacent in every grade, and any faculty who seem to be valuable connections for the student council social network.” 

“Well there’s probably a list-serv for stuff like that, right?”

“No. It’s not as if the list was the same every time. People are added, and people are removed. Factions fall out of favor, others rise, and some change their allegiances. After all, this is hardly the only Poli-Biz Halloween party happening tonight.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Of course! You think these hundred or so people are the only people involved with student council?”

“Wait, side-bar. What does student-council-adjacent mean?”

“There are plenty of people in Poli-Biz that are developing apps or something instead of running for office. They lean into the business part of Poli-Biz, instead of the politics.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, there are probably a dozen parties happening. Bea Proxima is at one of the lesser ones. Or well. Ahem. The rival one.”

“Who?”

“Nevermind.” That could come back to bite her if she was bugged right now (by someone other than herself). 

“Well. That sounds like a lot; keeping track of who’s in and who’s out.”

Elizabeth was tempted to openly stare at Gem. Was polite conversation some role-playing element of her costume? “It is.” She replied warily.

“Well, I notice one person who’s a bit of an odd one out here.”

“Who?”

“Youuuuu.” Gem drew out the syllable like the juvenile she was. Elizabeth didn’t know why she had expected more than a few polite sentences in a row from this person.

She gave another luxurious long sigh of exasperation. “How am I an odd one out?” 

“You’re just standing here without anyone to talk to. Except an Outer Ringer in flip-flops. Adam was the only person here who you were actually looking forward to seeing when you woke up this morning and remembered it was happening, right?” 

Gem was being unspeakably rude. When you encountered someone who was socially outcast, the thing to do wasn’t to point it out, it was to pretend they didn't exist. That wasn’t to say, of course, that Elizabeth was a social outcast. The Outer Ringer was clearly projecting her own feelings of inadequacy onto Elizabeth. Often mental healthcare was sadly lacking in the colonies, meaning people didn’t learn to subvert their own mental fallacies. It was pretty pathetic, but Elizabeth decided to play along while waiting for one of her many, many friends to get freed up from the conversations they were all currently in. 

“Does this line of inquiry have anything to do with the claim you made the night we cooked dinner? The claim that my friends don’t like me as much as I think they do?”

“I don’t want to make any claims, per se.” Typical Gem, making provocative statements but refusing to take responsibility for them. “I’m just saying. When Adam left, you lost your Arch. And I get it. I just lost my Arch.” Her Arch. Honestly.

“So what does that mean?”

“It means you don’t really want to be here anymore, do you?” 

“Of course I want to be here. And what’s more, I need to be here.”

“Why?”

“There are a thousand different moving parts to this event. Do you see that senator over there?”

Gem looked where she was pointing and squinted. “How do I tell who’s a senator?”

“The jewelry they wear on the front of their military uniforms clearly shows their rank and seniority.” Elizabeth dreamed of the day when she could wear her uniform to a Halloween party instead of this costume nonsense.

“Oh, of course.” Gem squinted some more. “Okay, I still don’t know which one you mean. But just imagine I do.”

“He is the student senator I’m interning with this semester. He has given me the opportunity to plan this party this year. It’s a feather in my cap. It’s a feather in the caps of everyone connected with me, as a matter of fact. And he gave me a particular objective for the party as well.”

“Wow! Really?! Holy shit!”

“Yes! Now you understand—“ Elizabeth trailed off when she realized Gem had been speaking sarcastically. “Anyway. I am tasked with keeping two of the upper level senators away from each other the entire night.”

“Why?”

“He’s far enough above me in rank that he doesn’t need to give me a reason. All I need to know is that I’m gaining invaluable social capital by doing this task for him.”

“Is that how it works? You just unquestioningly do random things for him this year, and then he gives you a student government job next year?”

“Well. Networking isn’t really about being sure the person will do something for you. It’s more about trying to put yourself in a position for it to be worth their while to benefit you.”

“So you’re trying to make it beneficial to them, to benefit you?”

“Yes.”

“But then why go to the trouble of networking with them?”

“What do you mean?”

“If they’ll only help you if it helps them, you don’t need to gain their favor by doing random bullshit for them. All you have to do is whatever you were going to do to make it valuable to them to help you. You can skip the middle step.”

Gem didn’t understand anything. Elizabeth couldn’t believe she had been allowed to move up this far in the Alexandrian educational system. 

“So you’re staying at this party not because you’re having fun, but because a guy who might help you with your stupid student government shit in the future—not that you have a guarantee or anything—told you to keep two random politicians from talking to each other the whole night? You’ve been putting this much effort into this party all semester, and at the moment you’re supposed to be enjoying it the most, not only does your fiancee ditch you, but you’re also left too busy with some random task to have any fun at your own party?”

Elizabeth hadn’t thought about all those facts at once before. Gem was being so annoying tonight. She didn’t understand that moving up in the world required you to make sacrifices for your own success. But no matter. Elizabeth didn’t need validation from some Outer Ringer with no ambition who had nothing better to do than make rude comments about other people’s life goals. Except then Gem said:

“Hey, listen.” Gem took off her douchey sunglasses and swiped her hair out of her eyes. “Do you want to go to a real party?”

***

Elizabeth could never quite explain, to herself or others, how Gem had talked her into this (though she would never even admit what happened that night to any hypothetical others). She felt the way she had when she was furtively carrying potatoes back to her dorm room, back when she had hung out with Arch and Gem for the first time. It felt like forever ago, though it had only been, what? A month? A little longer?

Her fix for the senator’s mission had been pretty easy to rig up. She had gotten some help from Arch in appropriating the use of all screens at the party to let her know where everyone was at all times.[1] Arch then set up an alert system to let her know when the trajectories of the two politicans were putting them on a collision course with each other. Elizabeth had just been planning to rush over to one of the politicians and engage them in highly directional conversation whenever that happened, but then Arch came up with the third part of the plan.

Arch had realized that people tended to cluster around serving drones because they were trying to get to the champagne on them. This created a big circle of people around each serving drone, and if a serving drone moved, their circle moved with them. Anyone walking around the party needed to navigate around these circles, whether they noticed it or not. Strategic rearrangement of the drones could create very specific paths through the crowd of the party, restricting any given person’s way from point A to point B in any way needed. Elizabeth would be able to tell if something was going wrong through the alert system, and reconfigure the drones accordingly.

As Elizabeth took another look at the roving herd of dots that represented the party on her screen, she heard Gem on a call with a shuttle to take them wherever they were going. Apparently the driver didn’t believe anyone would be going from the Poli-Biz party to this one, and was convinced this was a crank call. Aboard the shuttle, as Elizabeth watched the Bug Belt go by for the second time that night, she couldn’t help but feel the same way.

“Hey.” Gem said from opposite her. “Don’t embarass me.” She gave Elizabeth a crooked grin, and Elizabeth couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.

“Honestly…” Elizabeth went back to looking out the window.

“I’m serious. I barely even know these people.” 

“Then why are you going to their Halloween party?!”

“Their group’s shindigs are where I usually go to cruise.” 

“What do you mean, cruise?”

“You know, to find companionship. Of the one-night variety.”

“So this group is just a bunch of people you hook up with?”

“I also think they’re pretty cool people. But I guess yeah, I mainly just go to their parties, and hook up with people from the group every now and then.”

“And that’s your idea of a social network? What kind of professional relationships are you getting out of this arrangement?”

“I’m not a professional.” Elizabeth obviously couldn’t see her own reaction to that comment, but Gem looked very pleased. “That’s right. I’m just an Outer Ringer here to colonize Alexandria. If you know what I mean.”

“That doesn’t make sense.” 

“Yeah, it does.”

Gem’s gaze was too direct. It made it hard to dispute her ridiculous joke claims. This whole evening was turning into one of their little lunch dates exaggerated into the absurd.

Taking out her screen, Elizabeth furtively checked on the party again. Now that she was on the move, her screen showed the whole station system spread out before her like a Marauder’s Map,[2] with a cluster of red back at the station where the party was. She and Gem were moving away from the red dots, while Arch appeared to be back in their room. Adam, meanwhile, had made his way up to Voyager's room, where he and Voyager were sitting extremely close together. Elizabeth couldn’t see what they were doing, but they must have both been looking at the same screen or something. She had never particularly liked Voyager, so she was a little annoyed Adam kept spending all this time with him for work—Adam could have picked just about anyone to be his most trusted colleague. Anyone, including Elizabeth herself.

After a couple modifications to the drones' configurations, she put her screen away, and after another bout of her and Gem staring at each other felt compelled to break the silence: “So how did you start hanging out with this group? Who introduced you?” She didn’t particularly care about the answers to any of those questions, but somehow just sitting there with Gem’s brash presence made Elizabeth even more antsy than talking did. 

“One of them was curious about a paper book I was reading at dinner once.[3] He asked about it, and I didn’t really want to talk to him then, but I kept running into him and the others and I dunno, I guess they grew on me. They ended up inviting me to this weekly thing they do where they just hang out and look at weird stuff on the Internet, and I go every now and then. I took Arch once, but they didn’t really like the scene.”

“Why didn’t Arch like the scene?” Elizabeth asked apprehensively.

“Oh, you know. They’re not that outgoing. I mean, neither am I,” Elizabeth snorted incredulously at this. “—unless there are snooty Alexandrian princesses around who need a wake-up call.” Gem added in response.

“Princess?!” 

“I mean, you know; you’re part of the aristocracy.”

“Alexandria is a democracy!”[4] Elizabeth stood up, which is a very stupid thing to do in a space shuttle. She was thrown hard back into her seat. “OW!”

To her surprise, Gem crossed the shuttle and helped her up. Her face must have shown her surprise, because Gem looked irritated and said, “Outer Ringers are more polite than you think.” After they had both been back in their seats for several seconds of silence, Gem finally asked: “So what’s the deal with the red tape Adam’s dealing with right now?” 

Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “The red tape is a girl named Bea Proxima. I mentioned her before.” She was pretty sure this shuttle wasn’t bugged. “She’s another Alexandrian ‘princess.’”

“That’s a complicated monarchy you’ve got there.”

Elizabeth ignored that. “Bea Proxima was my parents’ second choice for my betrothal. For a while, she and Adam were neck and neck.”

“Oh, whoa. And now you’re like exes?”

“Not exactly. It wouldn’t have caused any bad blood, but Bea was actually Adam’s second choice for betrothal as well.” One of Gem’s eyebrows slowly ascended. “When our parents decided to betrothe us to each other, it left Bea without any suitors. She ended up being single until middle school because of it. She had to patch up some kind of arrangement with someone who’s not even from our side of the planet—though she and that Tau person have become quite the power couple.” Elizabeth felt the resentment in those words as they left her mouth.

“So you and Adam stabbed her in the back together when you were kids and now she’s got it out for you?” 

“We didn’t stab her in the back. Our parents didn’t even stab her parents in the back, though they certainly act like it.”

“Has it occurred to you that it might be true that you stabbed her in the back, and your parents are the ones ‘acting like’ they’re innocent?”

“No.” Elizabeth said sharply. Gem smirked, but didn’t push it. 

“Bea Proxima…she must have gotten made fun of for that in school.”[5]

“She did.” Elizabeth admitted. “Her full name is Betelgeuse, though, so Bea Proxima isn’t the worst possibility.”

“You really don’t want to admit you were mean to her in middle school, do you?”

“I wasn’t! I barely even understood what it meant; what Adam’s family and mine had done—“

“But you understood it enough, didn’t you? So while Adam and his crew were treating Arch and me like we were worse than non-existent, you were over at whatever boarding school your parents chose doing the same thing to this Bea Proxima.”

“It’s not like everyone can fit into a social scene, Gemini.” 

“Oh, I know.” Gem’s mouth twisted. She didn’t say anything the rest of the ride. Elizabeth got the distinct impression Gem was regretting bringing her along. She regretted coming. Well, I guess we can just both be miserable together, Gemini, she thought nastily as she stared into space. She supposed she had just given Gem a taste of her own provocative medicine.

The shuttle jerked to a halt at the airlock. Elizabeth was thrown off balance again, but Gem didn’t seem likely to extend a hand if she fell—the Outer Ringer jumped right up when the door opened and walked off without looking to see if Elizabeth was following.

Elizabeth was forced to break into a trot to keep up. Damn Gem’s exercise regimen… “So is there a theme for this Halloween party?”

“Weird shit.” Gem replied.

“Do we qualify for that?” Elizabeth genuinely didn’t know.

“We’ll be fine.” Gem said shortly. For a moment, Elizabeth wanted to run back to the shuttle and leave Gem to her “weird shit.” However, it would be rude not to stay for at least the requisite twenty minutes before making her excuses.

When they walked into the main room of the party, Elizabeth understood why Gem wasn’t concerned about them fitting the theme. No one would notice a couple non-weird looking people in the midst of all these incredibly weird-looking people.

“Does this group have parties very often?” Elizabeth called to Gem as they moved through the crowd.

“Um, what do you define as often?”

“I don’t know.” Elizabeth had just been making conversation. Had Gem thought Elizabeth actually wanted a quantitative estimate of how often this group had parties? Elizabeth could collect that data from one of her family’s apps. Maybe Gem didn’t know about her family’s apps. But how could she not?!

The conversation petered out there. On their way to the bar across the room, Gem kept glancing back to make sure Elizabeth was still following. Gem probably assumed Elizabeth would be uncomfortable if she was left to socialize with these odd looking people on her own, but that was yet another underestimate of Elizabeth's capabilities.

Gemini seemed to have an idea of Elizabeth as some kind of Jane Austen figure who fainted at the sight of another person’s ankles—but just because Elizabeth had sensibilities didn’t mean she had no sense. She might not want to touch the people on the dance floor, who were engaged in a new trend where you turned off your skin-level nanobots so sweat actually gathered on your body, but she could certainly make conversation at a party. Elizabeth’s social profiles, if Gem had actually cared to read them, included a mission statement listing her goals in life, such as learning and growing by networking with people who had different perspectives on life than her own. Elizabeth shared the values of the whole Eridani corporation in her love of diversity.

They arrived at the bar, snapping Elizabeth out of her self-congratulatory reverie.[6] She watched Gem print a drink from the bar interface, and Elizabeth was surprised to note it was non-alcoholic. It didn’t have any amphetamines, cannabinoids, opiates, or hallucinogens in it, either. No garden-variety stimulants like nicotine or caffeine, no benzodiazepines, no dissociatives. It was just a drink. Mildly sweet, so a small burst of energy, and hydrating, obviously. No other physical effects. 

Elizabeth ordered her typical cocktail—some alcohol, with a spurt of dex,[7] and a kick of epinephrine for good measure. It was the perfect party mix. The adrenaline made everything fascinating to her, giving even small talk a life-or-death significance. And with the dex, everything felt aligned in a perfect geometry, like Elizabeth could straighten the rows and columns of reality so that each second was a domino falling in a line leading to the ideal outcome for the entire universe. 

“How are there so many people at this party? This is about as many as there were at my party.” Elizabeth mused aloud. It was one of the only details she could think of to mention about this party that didn’t come with inherent criticism.

“What are you talking about? These are all the people this friend group hangs out with.” Gem really had no idea how to make conversation. 

“Well, I just thought that since they’re…you know…the bottom tier of AU social life, there probably wouldn’t be that many people here.”

“You’d be surprised at how many people there are on the bottom tier.” Gem sipped her drink. “Really, I’m surprised there are that many people in your tier of society, since you’re supposed to be so exclusive.”

Elizabeth didn’t have anything to say to that, so she too sipped her drink. The epinphrine in her cocktail wasn’t digestible, so the nanobots in her bloodstream plucked it out of her stomach and delivered it directly to her bloodstream. The whole party seemed to snap into focus with the vital urgency of a predator suddenly emerging from the underbrush. Elizabeth reflected that her overactive fight-or-flight reactions lately probably just meant she had been taking too much epinephrine lately. She would bring up the amphetamine in her diet to compensate.

As Gem walked ahead of her toward a table of what must have been her compatriots, Elizabeth was stopped by a ping. It was almost time for her hourly transparency post. If she hurried, she could make it back to the shuttle and back to the party in time. No one would need to know she was gone. Instead, she snapped a picture of her drink and posted it with several fashionable tags. No one would be able to tell she was at a different party. If asked later on, she could say she had conveniently forgotten to tag her location, due to the excitement.

At the table was an assortment of the most stereotypical examples of the kind of person who would go to this party. No two of them were dressed alike, which was very low-class, in Elizabeth’s opinion. Among Elizabeth's friends, hair colored even a shade or two off of the current dominant style would be considered outlandish and rude, while these people were working so hard to be edgy they made it so nothing was actually out of bounds. If their culture was anything like Poli-Biz culture, then they were dressing for the other people in the room, meaning they weren’t really rebelling at all. Maybe she did have something in common with them.

“Hey, all.” Gem nodded her head upwards in what she probably thought was some kind of Harrison Ford stoic cowboy greeting. Everyone seemed to like it, to Elizabeth’s disdain. Considering that Gem was wearing baggy, ragged clothes much like she wore every day, Elizabeth didn’t see why she would be accepted by this group. 

“Who’s your friend?” asked a redhead. Elizabeth almost showed her disgust at the color; the soft auburn shade was so neutral it looked like it could be his natural shade. The effect was almost as if he was naked. Elizabeth tried not to stare. 

“Her name is Elizabeth.” Gem turned toward Elizabeth. The rest of the introduction was apparently up to her. Rude.

“Sophomore Elizabeth Alexandria Eridani.” Everyone looked at her like she had just told a joke. Worse, it was a joke they only found mildly amusing. “I am majoring in Political Business. My acquaintance with Gemini—“ Loud bursts of laughter. “My acquaintance with Gemini is through my roommate, Arch, who is her best friend from high school. I do not know who they were introduced by. Arch is mine and Gemini’s only mutual friend.” Now they were looking at her like she was an animal in a zoo. “It is good to be connecting with all of you. What are your connections to Gemini, may I ask?”

The group exchanged glances, daring each other to go first. Finally, the redhead spoke up. “Junior Ceti.” Everyone at the table began to chuckle again, but Elizabeth nodded appreciatively to show him she was attentive to his introduction. It was even more important to be polite when everyone around you was being rude. “I am majoring in Comparative Physics. My acquaintance with Gemini—“ More stifled laughter. The redhead did a prissy sounding hem, then said in a haughty tone, “My acquaintance with Gemini is through her having eaten my pussy to within an inch of its life, and my own.” Full on laughter now. Gem was grinning wolfishly. 

“I see.” Elizabeth realized now that this was not a genuine introduction. She supposed she shouldn’t have expected proper manners from someone with that unprofessional a shade of red. She cast around for some topic of conversation she could engage in with these people, but she was cut off.

“Wait, me next.” A butch person toward the fringes of the circle made their way to the front. “Freshman Eridan.” Elizabeth did a quick headcount and there were more people in this group than she cared to hear mock her networking style. “I am majoring in pre-programming. My acquaintance with Gemini actually involves her bottoming—“ Another peal of laughter.

“We can skip the formal introductions if the group finds them comical.” Elizabeth had always been taught to accomodate those who were different from her. Though she rarely was granted the same courtesy in return. “You mean getting right into chat about the weather? Wouldn’t that be highly improper?” said the redhead. 

Everyone was looking at her. Not in the way she was used to, though. She glanced over at Gemini, who was sipping her drink to conceal her smirk. Just like an Outer Ringer to bring her to a party and make no effort to integrate her into the local social scene.

Preparing to speak, she set down her drink in her usual decisive manner. Several people immediately imitated it. They should count themselves lucky; the way one handled a drink was often as important as a handshake. “I would be perfectly happy to speak to you the way you speak to each other.” Elizabeth knew the importance of broadening one’s horizons. She could salvage the night by using this as a learning experience. 

"Talk with a Pollux accent."

"Tell us your kinks."

"Speak directly into my ass." The redhead smirked. Laughs all around.

Elizabeth really needed to lay off the epinephrine. She could feel the drug making her heart and breathing speed up; her palms sweating and intestines roiling like they hadn’t in years. More alcohol. That was all she needed. More alcohol.

She pushed to her feet without a word to the group and made her way to the bar, but somehow the display on the screen interface made her want to scream instead of order a drink. She noticed a set of French doors at the end of the hall, leading out into some kind of nature walk that doubled as part of the station’s air supply. Some fresh air would do her good. 

She walked blindly at a pace that would have let anyone watching know she was hurrying away from something. She kept bumping into low-hanging branches in her haste. Eventually the roar in her ears forced her into a crouch, as she tried to drown it out with the sound of her own slow, steady breathing. Her hands were gripping the back of her neck, and her eyes looked without seeing at the ground. She could feel her sensory input starting to wash out, like how sound too loud for a microphone that just gets picked up as white noise. She could feel the blood leaving her skin as her mind slowly started to float away from her brain, even though that didn’t make any sense, even though she knew the rational thing was to breathe and breathe and breathe until it came back, please please please not now please please please please…

The door swung open somewhere behind her, and she heard someone’s noisy steps approaching. 

“I thought you Alexandrian socialites could schmooze your way to the top of any social ladder.” Elizabeth had heard Gem speak at such ridiculous levels of smugness she couldn’t believe this new level she was hearing in Gem’s voice now. She could hear the Outer Ringer walking up behind her, but didn’t turn to look. There was an observation dome overhead here, much like in her family’s atrium on Centaurian Station, so the stars and the satellites of AU provided a much better view than Gemini Zhao’s smirk. 

“Perhaps we can, but we don’t always want to.” she tried to make her voice sound prim. 

“You know, you could learn something from being here. The way you feel at parties like this is probably how Bea Proxima felt all the time, trapped at high school with you and your friends.” Gem passed Elizabeth, not looking at her. She walked right up to the window and looked off into the distance with her arms crossed. 

“How could you say something like that?”

“What, how could I imply you’re inconsiderate of other people’s feelings?”

“No!” Elizabeth felt rage tingling along her arms. twitching into her fingers. “I mean, how could you think I don’t know how it feels to be left out? Whenever I hang out with you and Arch, no matter what I do, I'm always just as out of place as I was in there!”

“Have you ever tried, you know, 'being yourself?'"

“I don’t know how!” Gem had said it as a joke, but Elizabeth never got Gem's jokes. She was dimly aware of Gem staring at her, but she herself was staring at the floor. 

“Oh. Uh. I didn’t mean to make you cry…” Elizabeth kept her head down. There was a silence then that felt as wide as the galaxy.

Gem was approaching, but she didn't look up. She didn’t even look over toward Gem when the Outer Ringer sat down right next to her in the grass, looking up at the stars. Elizabeth was still in a panic-induced crouch, and without knowing quite why she shifted and sat down with this strange, ill-kempt person.

“I guess I’ve been in my share of situations where I didn’t fit in with the behavioral codes, or whatever…” Gem mused. "And I guess that's why you care so much about your stupid rules. You're terrified of not knowing what to do." "I always know what to do. Other people don't."

"That's like, basically the same." Elizabeth didn't bother responding, turning her gaze toward the stars that had been holding Gem's interest. Then: “You do look like a princess, you know.” 

Elizabeth didn’t know how to respond for a second, then giggled. “Princesses didn’t wear 1980s shoulderpads.”

“Sure they did. They had puffed up sleeves. Read a book.” Gem grinned. “That deer in the headlights look is really growing on me.”

“What look?” 

“The one you do when you don’t know what to say.” 

“I don’t know what you me—“ Elizabeth jumped about half a foot in the air, but when she landed Gem’s hand was still on her knee and she had no idea why.

“You’re doing it again.” Gem wasn’t smirking. This was new. Their faces were also very close together. Gem eased just the tip of her finger farther up Elizabeth’s thigh. Elizabeth shifted in her seat, but somehow instead of moving away from Gem she ended up opening her legs a bit, just as Gem’s mouth found hers and Gem’s hand found—

If she had been able to think, she would have been mortified at how she had whimpered into Gem’s lips just now. Her legs were spread wider but she had no idea how they had gotten that way, and Gem’s fingers were expertly toying with the fabric between them, and Gem’s hand was slipping up over the waist of her pantsuit, and both of them took in a big breath and held it as Gem’s thumb began a slow circle against her skin—

“Do you like it?” Gem purred in her ear. It took a minute for Elizabeth to even realize Gem had asked a question. Gem stopped. “If you don’t like it, I can stop.” Elizabeth could feel Gem grinning without seeing it.

Having to beg an Outer Ringer for sexual favors. How grotesquely humilating. Why was she wet? “Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes. I like it. Yes.” 

“Good girl.” Gem’s smirking tone had a hint of a growl to it. Something inside Elizabeth seemed to liquefy. She was pretty sure she was supposed to be on top during sex. She was pretty sure this was all wrong.

The door’s opening swish was almost silent, but somehow they both heard it and understood at the same time. They surprised each other with how fast they could spring up, straighten their clothes, and arrange themselves in postures of indifference. By the time the two giggling voices had vanished further into the greenhouse, Elizabeth’s pulse still hadn't dropped. She could feel the adrenaline crash coming on, though she wasn’t sure if that was all she was feeling. Gem was sitting on the other side of the bench, looking straight up at the stars as if she was alone. Silence slowly filled the space again.

“That…” She felt her voice shake a bit, and hoped Gem hadn’t heard it. “I hope we can treat this with some discretion—“

She trailed off. As she watched, looking for the polite thing to say in a situation never mentioned in etiquette listicles, Gem used her left hand to open a zipped pocket in her sweatpants. She took out the same wipes Elizabeth had seen her use after eating food. She felt a flash of indignation as the Outer Ringer wiped her hands clean. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell Adam or any of your friends.” Gem broke off as she wiped around her mouth, then used a separate wipe for the rest of her face. Then she shoved her hands into her hoodie’s pockets. “Just don’t tell my friends.” She turned her back on Elizabeth and headed back into the party. 

Elizabeth didn’t know if the cleaning ritual was offensive because of the implication that she was dirty, or the implication Gem had been eating her. But nevertheless, one thing she did know was that this situation required some kind of understanding between the participants, or their reputations would clearly suffer. 

“I just—we’re from different worlds…” Gem gave her a backward glance of utter contempt. She had been gone for several baffled seconds before Elizabeth facepalmed, realizing Gem would have assumed she was talking about the Outer and Middle Rings. Well, she had been talking about that, in a way, but it was much more than that. Outer Ringers always made everything about politics.

Elizabeth stood outside for several minutes in silence. She was certain that she should have been on top. Gem had been gone for fifteen minutes when she realized she was probably going to have to find her way back to the Poli-Biz party on her own. This was probably better; if anyone had seen them leaving together it would have given the wrong impression, and if they came back together it would just give more opportunity for people to…misconstrue. 

But they wouldn’t be misconstruing, she reminded herself in the back of her head. But yes, they would be misconstruing, she forcefully thought at herself—she and Gem had not left meaning to do…anything, so someone thinking that when they left together would have been wrong. They had never meant to do anything. It just happened.

But it didn’t happen, if you forget it. With that in mind, she strode, businesslike, into the main party, but stopped in the doorway. 

Things had progressed considerably since she had left the room. Casual sex was perfectly common in Poli-Biz circles, but Elizabeth had to note that this style was just crass. It took her a moment to spot Gem in the now-gyrating crowd, because she was off in a corner, kissing the redhead from before. Lovely. Things with the redhead were quickly getting along to where Gem and Elizabeth had left off. Elizabeth tore her eyes away in disgust.

Who did Gemini think she was fooling? This was almost as stupid as when she had pretended to go to the bathroom for twenty minutes at the Poli-Biz party, just to avoid being alone with Elizabeth. This was such a ridiculous situation. Adam might have left her behind, but he would never put her through this kind of insanity. She wished he had been there all night, to remind her what normal people were like.

Adam didn't answer when she called him, so she just waited a few minutes and redialed. She knew he wouldn't mind. She was halfway back to her dorm when he picked up.

“Elizabeth, have you called me fifteen times?!”

“Er, yes."

"Why?!'

"Oh, I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“You what?!” 

“Oh, you know, I miss you sometimes.” Though Elizabeth hadn’t been missing Adam so much as she had been missing the feeling of solid ground beneath her feet.

“What?” Now Elizabeth was getting kind of annoyed at Adam, come to think of it. She wished she had called her mother instead. She would have known what to say to make this swirling in Elizabeth's head go away. But she couldn’t call her mother. The thought of speaking with her mother right now made Elizabeth feel dirty somehow.

“Listen, Elizabeth, where are you? Why did you leave the party?”

The party had seemed a million miles away, but something in Adam’s tone made it come rushing back, along with a twinge in her stomach. “Why? Did something happen?”

“Did something happen? Are you kidding me?”

Elizabeth’s epinephrine had already worn off from the cocktail, but it sang through her veins once again at that. “What happened?” she asked, not wanting to know.

“Your plan with the drones failed. There must have been some kind of loophole in the algorithms, or perhaps someone should have been there to supervise the tech, and the two senators ended up striking up a chat in the middle of the dance floor.”

“Striking up a chat? Don't they hate each other?”

“No, Elizabeth! To the contrary! Under the right conditions, they could become very powerful, very mutually benefical friends.” It occurred to Elizabeth that the senator could have told them this. And how did Adam know it?

“So what happened?”

“You should know what happened!”

Elizabeth wondered where he was in relation to her. Was he in his room on Eridani station, a couple dozen floors up from her and Arch’s room? He could be on Alexandria station, where Voyager’s room was. Or perhaps he was back at the party.

Adam appeared to have gotten bored of waiting for her to speak. “Nothing seems to have happened, but our patron, our benefactor, our lifeline, is angry.”

“Ah. But things are salvageable then.” Elizabeth was too exhausted to maintain her adrenaline rush. She slumped back into her shuttle seat, hoping Adam couldn't see her let out a sigh of relief.

“You said you had it under control. Did you or did you not say that?” Adam was so infuriating when he was mad.

“I did say that, yes. And I did have it under control…” she trailed off.

“And what were the stakes if you did not have it under control?”

“It would make or break us in the next election.” 

“And despite this fact, what did you do at the most crucial moment of the night?”

“Can we leave aside the Socratic method for now, Adam?” Elizabeth asked, letting a note of her annoyance creep into her voice.

“Elizabeth, I genuinely want to know! What did you do when you were so clearly supposed to be ensuring our success tonight?”

Elizabeth didn’t know which would be worse: telling him she had gone off with Arch’s Outer Ringer best friend to hang out with a bunch of non-conformists on another space station, or telling him she had gone off with said Outer Ringer to get into a sweaty, fumbling tryst on another space station. “I was called away on another matter.”

“Are you kidding me?” Adam seemed able to fill in the blanks. “You decide to fuck someone after all these years and it’s just in time to blow the most important night of our lives?”

“That’s not what I was doing!”

“Mind you, I literally don’t care who you fuck; if it's on your own time you can fuck a maintenance drone for all I care--"

“Adam!” 

“ELIZABETH!” Adam leaned back in his chair, taking deep breaths and running his fingers through his hair.“Elizabeth, do you think we’re going to make student council next year after this?” 

“We’ll figure it out, love.” It felt weird calling Adam that, but he always addressed her as “love” when he wanted to calm her down, so…

“Love, eh?" Adam's grin looked like a grimace, and he leaned forward again so his face filled the whole screen. "Listen, darling, while you were fraternizing with the enemy, you might have ruined both our careers. Or at the very least, your own—and I don’t intend to go down with you. Not if I can help it,” he added bitterly. 

“Adam…where are you? We can meet up to talk.” Elizabeth prayed he would say no; she hadn't had the energy for this call.

“Never you mind.” Adam spat. He glanced offscreen again and seemed to gather himself. “My mother told me you were perfect because you were boring and rich. You’re lucky you’re still rich.” 

He hung up, and Elizabeth stared at her reflection in the blank screen for a moment. She looked tired more than anything else. Tonight had been exhausting. If that was a fight she had just had with Adam, she hated to think what a fight with someone you actually loved might be like. It was a good thing Elizabeth tried not to love anyone. 

So much for Adam cheering her up.

“Wait.” She said, addressing the shuttle’s AI. “Take me somewhere else.” She selected a new destination.

~~~

The Eridani Atrium was beautiful at night. A drone tried to shoo Elizabeth back to her room when she sat down by her mother’s statue, but when it identified her face it trundled off almost respectfully. In the low light, her mother was a shadow against the stars. It had never occurred to Elizabeth that her mother had probably wanted her statue to force the viewer’s perspective like this, to make her look like she could pluck the stars out of the sky and mix them into her coffee. Elizabeth gave a sigh of momentary calm, and lay down on the bench she had been sitting on, gazing up at the stars and satellites above. 

The statue had never really been a good substitute for her mother’s presence. For one thing, when she was spotted by her fellow Poli-Biz students staring up at a statue of her mother, it prompted whispers she would rather not encourage. For another, the stone face didn’t replicate the warmth and authority Berenice Reagan Eridani projected into every space she entered. Elizabeth was always wondering what she projected into spaces. 

Like most days in her life, Elizabeth had spent this one giving to others, and as usual she had not been repaid. Adam and Gem had each been unconscionably rude, despite everything she had done for them. But their rudeness wasn’t the reason she couldn’t stop thinking about them. Those conversations were ringing in her head, and she wished her mother were there to tell her Adam and Gem didn’t know what they were talking about. Her mother would know exactly why they were wrong.

~~~

She had been sitting there for an hour before she realized she should probably get home. Arch would probably be asleep. 

She entered the room. She remembered moving in here just three months ago, and seeing that a small, freckly person had already arrived. They had put one suitcase next to their bed, and Elizabeth would take days to realize that was all the moving in they intended to do. Now when she opened the door, Arch looked up from their computer in the exact same place and position they had been when she saw them for the first time. The majority of the interactions she had had with Arch had happened with them in this position.

“Arch?” Arch looked up. Elizabeth felt like she hadn't seen them in years, and they actually looked like they felt the same.

“Hey.” They threw off the blankets as if they didn’t know how they had gotten there. Elizabeth walked over to their bed and sat down, and Arch straightened up and pushed their screen to one side. “How was the rest of the party?” “Oh, incredible. Everything went perfectly according to plan. Thank you for that program for the drones, by the way. There were a couple bugs, but it was mostly perfect.” Elizabeth didn’t know why those words came out of her mouth, but they did.

“Nice. I was worried about a couple things, but I mean you would have been there to supervise so there was no real risk."

“Quite.” Elizabeth looked around the room. Somehow it was so good to be home. She had never been in a dorm room that felt like home before, not after her manor on Alexandria with its miles of hydroponics houses and seas of hy-ox[8] trees. It was good to be back here too, though. Back in this tiny metal box, with the tiny roommate that went with it. 

Lately she had been envisioning herself coming home to Arch in ways other than returning to the educational holding cell where they were both assigned to spend the year. Arch cooking some disgusting mashed potatoes in some kind of jerry-rigged chemistry lab, looking for all the world like a character on Breaking Bad. Her, ready to tell Arch about whatever victory she had achieved over the course of the day’s business. Adam off with a paramour perhaps, but he could come over for dinner sometime and they’d all catch up over drinks…

Before she even knew what she was doing, she leaned over and kissed Arch. She had thought about it in the back of her mind several times, though she had never planned on actually doing it. Who knew where their lips had been? She had only kissed people on rare occasions before, but she was always looking to learn new skills. Taking the dominant role as was her birthright, she was currently leading the sexual interaction by kind of pressing her lips against Arch’s continuously, while periodically releasing the pressure in order to gain more purchase against their mouth with her own. This created the characteristic smacking sound that she took as confirmation she was kissing successfully. She felt like she was hitting her stride when Arch put a hand to her shoulder and pushed her away.

“What are you doing?!” That was a more forceful rejection than was strictly necessary. Rude.

Elizabeth felt like she had downed another shot or two of epinephrine. “I—“

“Why do people keep doing that?!” 

What. “Keep doing what?” 

"Why is everyone planting one on me tonight?"

Elizabeth felt like the rainbow pinwheel that appeared on her screen when it froze. "Have other people kissed you tonight?"

“We are not talking about this.”

“Well, it would be fairly odd if we did not talk about it, Arch.” After everything she had gone through that night, Elizabeth thought it intolerably rude of Arch to refuse to discuss this.

“Well, fairly odd we shall be, then. Now go to bed!” Elizabeth had never heard Arch speak like this before. She didn’t know what to make of it, but she suddenly didn’t know why she had kissed them. The more she thought about the moldering clump of feelings she had been cultivating in the back of her mind the past month or so, the less sense it all made. Funny. They say daylight is the best disinfectant, but perhaps a little fumbling around in the dark works just as well. 

Elizabeth wordlessly went over to her bed and lay down. Every night when she went to bed, she tended to review the events of the day and consider whether she had accomplished what she had set out to accomplish. Now, Elizabeth tried to piece together the events of the night into a coherent narrative, a goal achieved, a flaw overcome, a step made in a journey—but there was no sense to be made from it all. She felt unmoored, like the cluster of facts and feelings that made up her consciousness was diffusing into the air around her. How rude of her identity to desert her like that. 

The only light in the room was Arch’s screen, which was on at least until after she fell asleep, if not the entire night. Elizabeth lay there watching the flickering from Arch’s screen playing across the ceiling. The last thing she heard was something like quiet sobbing, but she wasn't sure if that was a dream.

Footnotes

1This was highly illegal, and extremely easy for Arch to do. [return to text]

2Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a story about how wildly invasive surveillance technology is actually a good thing if you’re The Chosen One™ and can be trusted to use it for the right reasons. The main character goes on to become a wizard cop, so we can rest assured that the information in the Marauder's Map probably wasn’t abused at all after the events of the books. [return to text]

3Fifty Shades of Grey. The Madame Bovary of the 21st century, and a canny adaptation of an existing narrative (Shakespeare did the same thing). Like many great works, Fifty Shades is fanfiction with the names changed (c.f. the Roman pantheon, Dante's Inferno, most works of Walt Disney (a former U.S. President, and current god-emperor of Zeta Leporis), and Paradise Lost. [return to text]

4It isn't. [return to text]

5Bea Proxima sounds like the name of the star Proxima b, which is where Bea’s family got their last name during the first wave of colonization, just like Elizabeth’s in the Eridani system. Arch's last name Proximus is another variation. [return to text]

6Time flies when you’re re-stating what you believe your own values to be to yourself in your head in order to stifle the cognitive dissonance between those ideals and your actual preferences. The only thing better than that is extensive fantasizing where you soothe your insecurities by imagining you have the qualities you fear you lack. [return to text]

7Dextroamphetamine, or dex, is a CNS stimulant with many uses for the everyday Alexandrian on the go. Part of the amphetamine family, most Alexandrians just can’t reach acceptable levels of performance at work without its effects. Small amounts of it are habitually used in coffee, to the point where if you don’t want any you have to specify you want your drink dex-free. Dex is considered an essential of life for most Alexandrians, though if you use large amounts of it you should get a delimiter implanted in your heart to keep your pulse within safe levels. [return to text]

8Hyper-oxygenated. They jimmied the leaf cells so they put out double the oxygen during photosynthesis; makes for terraforming planets more easily. It also has the handy side effect of helping humans pollute their planets with fewer consequences—though there are still consequences. There are always consequences. [return to text]


	23. Chatlog 02-05-3432-0503

Chatlog 02-05-3432-0503

Ana: I don’t care about Gem. 

Arch: I only care about you. 

[Arch has stopped typing] 

Ana: The fact is, 

Ana: I used to care about no one, 

Ana: And now I care about you. 

Ana: That means the number of people I care about has increased 100% in the past few months. 

Ana: I do not want to continue that trend. 

Arch: That’s not how caring works, unfortunately. 

Arch: I mean, you can not hang out with Gem if you want, 

Arch: But other people to care about are going to find you. 

Arch: We’re relentless. 

Ana: So am I. 

Arch: So you just don’t plan to ever have any real relationships? 

Arch: For like, your whole life? 

Ana: What I mean is that this one is enough. 

Ana: My work is too important to let more distractions get in the way. 

Arch: So I distract you from Your Work? 

Ana: I mean, of course you do. 

Ana: At acceptable levels, of course. 

Ana: But yes. 

Arch: So any more human connection than just me would bring the distraction to unmanageable levels. 

Ana: Very probably. 

Arch: I’m curious; is this just a time thing, like you have fewer hours in the day left to work, 

Arch: Or does opening your heart to other people make you less suited to the brutal dog-eat-dog environment of academia? 

Ana: It seems like you already know the answer is both. 

Ana: You are asking a rhetorical question. 

Arch: But really, I’d just love to hear, 

Arch: In your own words, 

Arch: What makes me “a distraction.” 

Ana: Now you are using passive aggression. 

Arch: Correct. 

Arch: But I still want to know the answers to my rhetorical and passive aggressive questions. 

Ana: Well Arch, the fact is: 

Ana: Caring only leads to pain. 

Ana: Since I have begun caring about you, 

Ana: I have gone through so much more pain than I used to… 

Ana: I worry about how much more pain you will cause me. 

Ana: Not to mention how much pain I may cause you. 

Arch: I guess that’s kind of the risk you take, being a human. 

Arch: But I actually agree. 

Ana: Then it’s settled. 

Arch: I guess so. 

Ana: ……… 

Ana: Confirm what is settled. 

Arch: We shouldn’t be together. 

Ana: That is not what I was trying to settle. 

Arch: Isn’t it though? 

Ana: No. 

Arch: We live lightyears away from each other. 

Arch: If caring about people who are right in front of you is painful, 

Arch: That must be an order of magnitude more painful. 

Ana: Well, we are already committed to that pain, are we not? 

Ana: When I spoke of the pain you had caused me, 

Ana: I did not mean that you should stop. 

Arch: Oh, so caring about people is only bad when you say it is? 

Ana: It is only bad when it is actually bad. 

Arch: So like, when you say it is. 

Ana: Yes, in that I say it is based on logical rules that dictate when it is. 

Arch: And I’m guessing what you say is logical…because you say it is? 

Ana: I am obviously not making claims to omniscience. 

Ana: Only you act like you have all the answers. 

Arch: I mean, I’m just asking you! 

Arch: What are the logical rules that make human connection with me acceptable but connection with anyone else unacceptable? 

Arch: Because it’s really starting to seem like you’re only putting me in the “acceptable” category, 

Arch: because you like me. 

Ana: Obviously. 

Arch: No. Like, you like-like me. 

Ana: …yes. 

Ana: I like you. Double. 

Arch: It’s a testament to how obvious you’re being that my anxiety even let me write that message. 

Arch: You’ve got a giant crush on me, Ana Kepler. 

Arch: You want to date me. 

Arch: You want us to be dating. 

Arch: Don’t you? 

Ana: I guess when you put it that way, then yes. 

Ana: Um 

Ana: Do you like me? 

Ana: Like like me, rather? 

Arch: Ana. 

Arch: I’ve been listening to you talk about historical inconsistencies on teen dramas for almost a year now. 

Arch: Of course I like like you. 

Arch: Not that your ranting isn’t interesting non-romantically, but I wouldn’t listen as much if I didn’t like like you. 

Ana: Well then. I suppose it is, in fact, settled. 

Arch: Great. 

Arch: Was that so hard? 

Ana: It was extremely hard. 

Arch: Well, aren’t you glad you did it? 

Ana: …Possibly. 

Arch: I’ll take it. 

Arch: <3 

Ana: ……….. 

Ana: <3 

[end of transcript] 


	24. Gem

Gem hated waking up in other people’s rooms, even the redhead's. She willed herself not to think about the oil from their hair that had probably seeped into the pillowcase she was using, or about when their sheets had last been washed. She would clean the filth off herself soon enough.

Last night was blurry, but not nearly blurry enough. She remembered leaving with the redhead, running off to kiss Arch, then running away to find the redhead again. They hadn’t been crazy about being ditched and then abruptly un-ditched, but Gem guessed her Han Solo vibes had smoothed the whole thing over. They had headed back to the redhead’s room without too many questions.

The sex was hurried, like in an Indiana Jones movie where a door will be sliding shut downwards and Indy will run back, reach under and grab his hat at the last second. Afterward, Gem felt like she had put a barrier between herself and the events of the night, so she let herself forget it and snuggled into their breasts before falling asleep.

Unfortunately, in the harsh light of the room’s “day” light setting, it was immediate again. She had fingered Elizabeth. She had kissed Arch. Neither of those moments went well, and Arch and Elizabeth were kind of the only people she hung out with. The bar was so low that even Elizabeth counted as a person she hung out with.

Gem was nocturnal, like all the best people, so it was already noon and she had no plans to get out of bed. The redhead had actually left for class hours ago, but had told a groggy 9 AM Gem it was fine if she stayed. Gem couldn’t believe it—she would never have left someone alone in her room—but if it meant she didn’t have to get up at ten it didn’t matter much to her. She barely even remembered the conversation, which probably meant she had conducted it in grunts and moans. Just like the sex last night, she smirked to herself, but her heart wasn’t in it.

She remembered mornings like this when she would wake up with a hangover. She also remembered the fragile beauty of being drunk, her head feeling like a spinning top that was just beginning to wobble. All the background noises in her head would finally just shut up, and instead of all the clamoring “wash your hands” and “don’t touch that,” there would be only one train of thought in her head, and then none. She wondered if she would ever find her way back to having only one train of thought.

She reached for her screen, where she had left it on the redhead’s nightstand. To her horror, her hand brushed a glass the redhead had left by their bed. She had been planning on dozing for at least another couple hours, but now she had to get up and wash her hands. She felt a shot of hot black loathing roil up inside her toward the dirty glass. She was tempted to throw it across the room, but there was no point.

She rolled out of bed and wandered over to the bathroom. Arch had disabled Gem’s room’s ads, so all the drifting brand logos and pop-ups made her dizzy as she made her way through the room. 

She wondered if Elizabeth had told Arch about what happened. She wondered if Arch had told Elizabeth. Elizabeth had an incentive not to tell, but she had basically no lying skills. If Arch asked her, it would basically all be over. Luckily, Arch probably wouldn’t ask. However, if they did and Elizabeth told, they might try out some of that friend stuff they did and tell Elizabeth about what happened between them and Gem. It was the kind of thing they might do.

There were washcloths in the bathroom, but they had all been used. Gem shuddered at the thought of smearing another person’s skin secretions all over her own. When she looked closer, she could even see bits of makeup, meaning the redhead used the washcloths both to wash their face and to take off their makeup, meaning that when they washed their face they were just rubbing their makeup from last night into their pores. Horrifying. 

Dammit. Her dorm was a half-hour’s shuttle ride away. She needed to wash herself before she left, but not if it meant replacing the grime from the redhead’s bed with more grime from their washcloth. A prickly-hot frustration was building up behind her eyes, and her sluggish early-morning thoughts felt like they were bumping into each other in her head. She had been sinking her fingernails into her palms for several seconds before she noticed she was doing it.

Dammit. This was why she needed to be seeing a shrink. Out of sheer determination to be fine without a shrink, she removed her nails from her flesh and forced herself to take deep breaths. Okay. How would she deal with this? First, she would have the room make her coffee. Then, she would look around for something, anything, she could use to wash off her face. But first, she would wash her hands.

The sink was filthy. Why were countercultural queers so messy?! Being clean could be punk too, Gem fumed to herself as she lather lather lathered and scrub scrub scrubbed. She rinsed her hands thoroughly and checked her fingernails. She let her hands drip dry as she looked around the bedroom for another towel. 

Her hands dry, she slipped them into her sweater and used her sleeves to push the appropriate buttons on the room’s drink machine to make her a strong black coffee for breakfast. Then she used the same technique, perfected over the years, to open a drawer from the wardrobe that was bolted onto the back wall. After pulling all the drawers open, she kicked them each back into the wall in turn. It only helped her simmering rage a little.

Gem was eventually reduced to pacing around the room, her brain burning. The ads on the wall felt like an assault of primary colors and earworm jingles; she wanted to smash every screen she saw. This was what people didn’t understand about OCD; it didn’t just give you anxiety, it made you blindingly angry. When you’ve washed your hands twenty-one times in a day, and then you unexpectedly have to wash your hands for Time Number Twenty-Two, it teaches you the definition of homicidal rage. 

She was grateful no one was around. Having to talk to another human while managing this level of rage would be impossible. In such situations she usually didn’t let herself speak, for fear of what she would say. Anyone who knew Gem Zhao knew that if she was watching her mouth, things must be serious. 

Wait. Arch’s room was on this station. She could go use Arch’s toiletries! If she was willing to go to the room where the girl she had fingered last night lived. Along with the friend she tried to kiss last night.

Well, if it would get her face washed, maybe it would be worth it. The only alternative was getting a bunch of napkins from the dining hall and taking them into a public bathroom to wash her face. Gem knew from experience this would be more than likely to make everything worse, since pretty much every cloth napkin supplied by the dining hall had food stains on it. Gem had once tried to wash with one without noticing before, and had to scrub at her face in such a frenzy it left her face raw for several days. 

An alternative would be taking napkins from the dispenser until she found one that was clean, but that came with several problems. One, touching the dirty napkins would make her hands dirty. If she took time to make sure she was grabbing the napkin on a clean spot before she pulled it out, she would then be able to take napkins out indefinitely, but that left handling them so as to find their stains. That could be accomplished by only touching clean parts, but that would lengthen an already lengthy process. By the time Gem got through two or three napkins, people would be waiting for her to leave so they could get napkins, or at the very least watching from nearby tables. Gem might not even find a clean napkin within a reasonable span of time.

She grabbed the coffee from the drink machine and, using her sweater to touch the doorpad, left the room. She made sure to send the redhead a text thanking them for the extra sleep—she was slutty, but she wasn’t impolite. The station noticed when she made a wrong turn, and prompted her screen to remind her that “if you’re going to [Arch’s Room], which is one of your favorite locations on [Eridani Station], you should double back and go straight on when you get back to the station gym!” The words “Arch’s Room” and “Eridani Station” were spoken in a just-barely-different cadence from the rest of the sentence. 

And then she was walking down the hallway from last night, and approaching the door from last night, and finally standing in front of the room from last night, wondering if the person she had kissed last night was inside. The stream of social anxieties that ran through her head while considering whether and how to knock on the door were strong even by Gem’s standards; she almost stopped thinking about needing to wash her face as she stood there. She stared at the door. All she had to do was knock. You know. Knock. Let the people inside the room know she was there, and wanted to come in. Hand in a fist, percuss the door with knuckles. Knock knock knock.

She didn’t knock.

She thought: Arch would almost certainly be in their room, they were almost never anywhere else. So there was one awkward encounter she was guaranteed to have. And Elizabeth might be there too, making two awkward encounters. But you know, the two might cancel each other out. Perhaps Arch and Elizabeth each wouldn’t want to talk about their sexual encounter with Gem in front of the other, leading them to pretend to each other, and to Gem, that nothing had happened. Yeah. That would work. Except if there was only one of them there. Then that whole theory she had just thought of was useless. There was also the especially bad outcome of Elizabeth being the only one in the room.

She had now been standing there for several minutes. None of the reasons she wanted to set herself on fire right now were going away. But she still didn’t knock. She kept thinking, and she kept not knocking.

She tried to separate her mind from her body, and watched from a detached distance as her body slowly moved her hand forward, curled into the customary position with which one knocks. It wasn’t her knocking, it was someone else. It didn’t have anything to do with her. But she didn’t have the concentration to dissociate that fully this early in the morning. She kept not knocking. She stayed like that……for a while.

***

She would be back on her dorm station in just twenty minutes. She hadn’t knocked. She kept reaching up to touch her face habitually, then remembering that would taint her hands too, and putting her hands back into her lap. It would take almost nothing for the school to print paper towels for the bathrooms. It would cost them almost nothing. It wouldn’t even cost the environment like it used to, since they would be printed from pure carbon without killing any trees. Not that the environment on Alexandria was exactly being done any favors by humans not chopping down trees[1] for that specific purpose.

I’ll be back at my room in no time. I can keep from touching my face until I get back. It’ll be fine, she told herself. It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay…

These kind of thoughts were hardly what her CBT called for, but Gem was hardly in the mood. She had a space-side window, so the stars looked like they were repeating themselves right along with her racing thoughts. White knuckles turned to raw red palms as the shuttle meandered at the laziest possible pace toward Gem’s dorm station. By the time the airlock hissed, there were half moons etched into her palms as red as her instant messages. There were some days where she just thought her way all the way through like this, from start to finish. There had been one day, long ago, when she became convinced her heart was about to stop, and she had kept her finger to her pulse the entire day to make sure she could call a medic when it happened. She couldn’t go to the medic about it before something happened. They knew her by now. They would sigh, give her their stupid diagnostic test, and shunt her out through the system, and her parents would call asking why they got an extra month’s room and board in medical bills. Not that they needed to give a fuck about it. They just could give a fuck, so they did. Anyway, the next day there was a bruise on her neck on the place where she had kept her fingers, listening to her pulse.

She was nearly there, so the hot anger behind her eyes would soon dissipate. Her own station was typically orbiting close to Eridani Station, where Arch and Elizabeth lived, but today it had been especially far away. Gem had long ago understood that when you don’t want to go back home to your empty single room after spending the day with your best friend, the shuttle will always take you back there in no time, but when you need to get back to your one sanctuary from all the filth abounding around your college, the one controlled space where you can forget the majority of your obsessions for just a little while after class every day, that is the day when it will take you forever to get home.

The shuttle docked with its usual hiss. Gem thought of the number of times she had heard that hissing in the past 24 hours and grimaced. Why she had asked Elizabeth to go to that party she would never know. She hadn’t even planned on going herself, until she noticed the Alexandrian looking all mopey. She guessed Elizabeth had just looked so left out of her own social scene; it was one of those things you always want to see but then don’t have the heart for once you actually get your wish. 

Oh boy, I can’t wait to have this problem solved so my stupid fucking brain can create ten more problems immediately, she thought, even as she sped up on her way down the hall to her room. But when she reached her room, she found ten more problems waiting for her already.

Her door was open, and there was an RA wearing shoes standing just inside it, boredly checking off items on a to-do list on their screen. Gem’s RA had never been that great about Gem’s OCD rules, but walking into her room while wearing shoes was basically the first rule on Gem’s list, and at this point they couldn’t pretend to not know it.

“Hello? What are you doing in my room?”

“Oh, hello Gemini.” Gem’s RA might have been at that party last night. Or at least one of the people trying to get in. “It’s monthly room inspections. The first of every month; you know.”

“Um,” Gem began.

“It’s great you’re back, actually. I was going to have to come back later to do part that requires you to be here, but now we can get that out of the way too.” They gestured to her closet. “I’ll need you to open up all your drawers. I can’t legally touch anything in here, but I do have to look.”

“Uh. Yes.” Gem hated her voice when she talked to authority figures. It was the opposite of how she imagined talking to authority figures. “But…” the RA looked at her like she was a child playing a very annoying game. “You’re wearing shoes.”

The RA glanced down at their shoes. “Oh. Well, I mean, I have to get through these quickly.”

“The shoe thing is kind of—“

“Listen, let’s just get the inspection done and then I can get out of your room.”

Gem stepped into the room, wincing as she walked over the threshold without taking off her shoes. After all, there was no point in taking off her shoes when the floor was already contaminated with shoe; the only result would be her socks becoming contaminated with shoe-contaminated floor. 

She paused. The bathroom. Her face. She started walking into the bathroom. “Can you just wait for one second—“

“For what? Where are you going?” It flashed across Gem’s mind that her use of the word “just” was minimizing language; she used it to buffer her requests to make her needs seem less offensive. Just like the RA interrupting her was a show of verbal dominance. 

“Um. I was going to wash my face.”

“Now?” 

“It’ll only take a second.”

“Listen, I just need to see those drawers. I have a lot of rooms to get through.”

Gem stammered for a moment, but the look the RA gave her was enough to get her across the room and opening drawers. When the RA asked her to do things for the rest of the tour, they used the kind of voice you would use with a very troubled child who could explode at any time. Which perhaps was what Gem was. It was certainly what she felt like. Meanwhile, the heat of anger in her sinuses was making her clench her jaw. Gem’s jaw was almost never unclenched, but still. She opened the drawers with one hand, and sunk her nails into her palms with the other. She gave it an extra violence to account for how she really wanted to be sinking her nails into the RA—though she wouldn’t want to touch them to do it even if she could.

The RA’s final enormity was to make Gem take their screen and fill out a form certifying this inspection had been completed. Then they left, with a sigh that suggested they’d be telling somebody all about this later when they were asked “how was work?”

As soon as the door swiffed shut, Gem sprang into action. First, the long-awaited facewashing. She tied her hair up first. This would ensure her greasy hair wouldn’t touch her face and ruin its cleanliness before she had a chance to take a shower, forcing her to wash her face again. That done, she washed her hands and face. Her face felt so dirty that after she used the washcloth she immediately threw it in the hamper, replacing it on the rack with a clean one. Then she washed her hands one more time, in case any particles from her face were lingering there. She stepped out of the bathroom, glanced around the room, and sighed. More reluctantly, she sprang into action again. First, she removed everything from the floor. She had no idea where the RA had stepped, so it was best to take everything from the floor and put it in the trash, the hamper, what-have-you. Gem supposed the holiday cleaning would do the room some good. Eventually, the floor was free of debris, and ready for the real cleaning job to begin.

She hadn’t removed her own shoes when she came into the room, because what would be the point when the RA’s shoes had already contaminated the floor. Gem now sat on her bed, removed her shoes, and placed them under her bed from whence they could be safely moved to their designated spot by the door later. Then she reached just a bit farther than was comfortable into her closet (bending around the right angle of her desk) to get to the mop she kept in there. 

This was another out-dated oddity of hers. Everyone thought doing your own cleaning was so weird, but guess what, Gem was weird. She couldn’t wait for a cleaning drone to get to her room when the heat behind her eyes and the prickling inside her eyes and the stabbing in her palms was going on the whole time she waited. So she stood up on her bed with the mop, which she’d had specially printed, gradually painting the room wet as far as she could reach. 

The floor was the first part. It was the easy part. She had literally no idea what the RA had touched, though they had only done the part that involved looking around the room, so they shouldn’t have touched anything. But she had no idea. She would never know. People touched all kinds of things. Gem knew better than anyone that even when people weren’t supposed to touch things, even when they knew that perfectly well, they almost always touched the things anyway. 

When Gem could no longer reach anywhere in the room with the mop, she jumped off the bed into the clean area of floor. Her socks, which had been in her shoes from the moment she got out of bed at the redhead’s, were uncontaminated. She had been sure to keep her feet off the floor as she took her shoes off for just this reason. She had reconciled herself to getting her socks wet, but she didn’t mind that.

She got the last bits of the room mopped, including the floor in the bathroom, and then used cleaning fluid and wet paper towels, printed fresh from a receptacle in the kitchen,[2] to get the very edges of everything in the room, which the mop tended to miss. The floor was done. Now came the tricky part. 

She changed her sheets and pillowcase, since keeping those clean was one of her highest priorities and therefore warranted leaving nothing to chance. Surveying the room, she picked out a few spots the RA was certain or more-likely-than-not to have touched: the kitchen counters, all the interface pads around the room, which she cleaned regularly anyway, and the handles on all the drawers and cabinets, which she didn’t trust the RA not to have opened before she got back. She cleaned these with the paper towels and cleaning fluid.

Then Gem put everything away, got in the shower, and scrubbed herself off with an efficiency only someone who grew up with time-limited showers could achieve.[3] When she came out, it had been over an hour since she returned. It had been a little over twelve hours since her pair of sexual mishaps. Now, finally, she could sit down on her bed and begin to cry.

Maybe it was because Gem cried so rarely, but when she did cry it was like she was possessed. After fifteen minutes, the sobs wracking her body didn’t feel like part of her anymore, but something taking hold of her and shaking her, like a Polaroid picture. The convulsions brought her inner babble down to one train of thought, and then to none. After thirty minutes, whatever had entered her had used her up. Her body, normally so full of fidgets and compulsions, settled with its arms wrapped around its legs, blankly staring at the wall in front of her.

Eventually, she got up and made herself a cup of tea. For the first time since she had left her room the night before, she paused and considered the space. There wasn’t much of it to consider, so it took her all of a second. A single room was half the size of a regular room, and since a regular room was only two-thirds of the space two people needed, that made for some interesting math when it came to fitting all of Gem’s possessions inside. Luckily, with shelves and a natural distaste for physical objects, Gem was able to make it work. In fact, Gem felt like—mental finger guns—she had all the space she needed, considering the porthole that gave her a look out onto space. Not a vindow screen, but real space. 

Hair dripping a wet spot into her bedsheets, she sat with her mug, pensively staring out the window where Eridani station was transiting by—the real one, not a feed!—carrying Arch and Elizabeth and their room and the redhead and their room. She didn’t know why she scanned the station for Arch and Elizabeth’s window, but she did. Look for them, check on this, pick that scab. 

After watching more of Eridani station’s orbital period than was strictly time-efficient, her phone dinged telling her to get food and go to yoga. She didn’t tell anyone she went to yoga, she just did. And she really needed a mental palate cleanser after the past 24 hours. She left her little porthole behind in her room, left the stars to swirl without her for a while.

The class started with a meditation, which she as usual was physically incapable of participating in. She sat there while the rest of the class cleared their minds, listening absently as her OCD’s subroutines continued to operate in the background of her thoughts. The upheaval of kissing three people and getting rejected by two of them, along with her Bataan death march of shame this morning, the unexpected inspection, and the cleaning afterward, had kicked her brain into high gear. The usual whispers of what if you forgot this and check that were going at speeds fit to make Gem dizzy. 

This was why she liked yoga. It reminded her there was a body outside of all those thought loops, and outside that body there was a mat, and a floor, and an endless expanse of oblivion. She fluttered her eyes open, and was reminded of the endless expanse as the studio’s breathtaking full-wall vindow view of space re-asserted itself in her vision. She imagined the whole class outlined against the stars, shadows moving against shadow. We can only distinguish ourselves from the void because of how we block the starlight. Isn’t that sad? Gem noted that this was a pretty off-brand thought for her to have, but inwardly shrugged.

“Blink your eyes open.” Cornelia, the teacher, was wearing her usual bright orange stretchy pants and sports bra. Gem’s social anxiety often made her worry that Cornelia worried she, Gem, was stalking her. Gem came to yoga at almost every opportunity, so she was there for most of Cornelia’s classes. Cornelia’s eyes flickered over to her in recognition before addressing the rest of the class again. “I wanted to start this class with a teaching from the Buddha.”[4] Gem settled in, preparing to blank out for the next few minutes. Cornelia had a penchant for starting classes with half-baked speeches on Buddhism.

“Everything is burning.” Gem was caught off guard by this unexpectedly metal sutra. She actually listened, perhaps for the first time. Cornelia caught her eye and faintly smiled; Gem wasn’t very sneaky about not listening. “The Buddha taught that the senses, which allow us to perceive the world—and the feelings we have because of what we perceive—are fires inside us. The flames are our loves, our hates, our dreams, our suffering. And they use us up. To live is to suffer, which is to burn, and everything that burns is reduced to ashes.” Gem certainly felt reduced to ashes right about now.

Cornelia went on: “All of this world is alive, but bound by time, doomed to die—every moment we are alive is a moment when we are being consumed by those flames.” Cornelia looked around at the room and grinned. “As a bio major, I can tell you the Buddha was correct on that one. Our cells age because of a process called oxidization, which is the same process that happens when something burns. As we age we are all, quite literally, burning. “Sounds pretty gloomy. But I interpret this a little differently than the Buddha. Life is pain, sure, and life is burning, but that is what makes it beautiful. Fire gives light; fire gives heat. So why run from it? This is your life. This is your suffering. And it will be over much too soon.” Cornelia gave the class a little smile that was as perky as the rest of her. “Now then. Let’s start on our hands and knees.”

Later in the class, when the station rotated such that the sun peeked out over Alexandria’s horizon, Gem caught a brief glimpse of that giant ball of fire. She couldn’t tell if it was rising or setting. Did it matter? 

The sun was burning. Alexandria was burning. Gem herself was burning, and Arch and Elizabeth and even fucking Ana out on India. And as the sun disappeared behind the planet again, it seemed to Gem like the flame went out.[5]

Footnotes

1 There weren’t trees on Alexandria originally, but there weren’t people there originally either. [return to text]

2 For a small fee for each. Gem had racked up quite the bill on paper towels, but her parents politely skirted around the subject in a way that made Gem feel like they had spent a whole dinner digging into her about it. [return to text]

3 It's like sure, they could print more water, but the school also save itself the trouble by only allowing the showers to work for short amounts of time. This make the school’s water supply into a closed system, requiring little to no maintenance. [return to text]

4 All the most sacred Buddhist texts were lost when Earth’s India was one of the first places to become uninhabitable, and the reproductions of those texts on Earth’s Internet were lost either when their server farms crashed or simply when the colony ships went out of range of Earth’s wifi. All that remains of Buddhist teachings are what was brought onto the colony ships by practicing Buddhists. Very unfortunately, white Buddhists from America were now 50% of the world’s Buddhist population. They were also the most vocal—it was estimated that 80% of the time someone tried to tell someone else about Buddhism on a colony ship, it was an American Buddhist. In 99% of those situations, the American had never read an actual Buddhist text. However, it just so happens that Cornelia is giving the class an actual, though much garbled, rendition of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon. [return to text]

5 But it didn’t really, of course. The night Gem kissed Arch would turn out to be her last time in Arch and Elizabeth’s room for a long time. She would spend the rest of the semester avoiding Arch's room, hosting them in her room as their interactions because gradually less awkward.  
As for Elizabeth, she would spend an agonizing month winning Adam back to her side, helped on by each of their parents, who were still very keen on the massive business venture that would be their marriage. Adam, being the sensible young man he is, would comply with his parents’ wishes. Elizabeth would feel something cold/ missing/ shifted in their friendship, but only in fleeting moments—Adam’s charm would take care of that.  
Arch, feeling jovial in a way that had happened to them maybe twice before, would barely even be put off by their two best friends not speaking to each other yet again. The only cloud on the horizon would come when their mother emailed to tell them that Berenice Reagan Eridani was very interested in hosting them for a week or two during the holidays, and that they would not be allowed to pack clothes that the family wardrobe committee had not approved.  
And Ana? For that, you’ll need to wait until next semester. [return to text]


End file.
